In 1651 Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan announced that the ‘question…by what door the Right, or Authority of Punishing…came in’ was one of ‘much importance’. In this he echoed Hugo Grotius who, while differing from Hobbes in the answer he provided, had written in 1625’s De Jure Belli ac Pacis [The Rights of War and Peace], that the ‘Origine and Nature’ of punishment had been ‘misunderstood…[giving] Occasion to Many Mistakes.’ This right to punish was seen by early modern political thinkers as needing justification. This was particularly true in the context of voluntarist models of legitimacy according to which individuals chose to become members of the political community and the right to enforce obedience wielded by the governors of these communities had its roots in the equal and natural rights of subjects themselves.

This chapter examines how active citizenship or political participation, and representation were understood in Europe from the early sixteenth century to the mid seventeenth century. There are two central arguments which I put forward and seek to defend it what follows. First, there was a noticeable shift from direct participation to representation as the main form of political involvement during this period. Second, and more importantly, whereas in the early part of the period political participation was understood mainly as a duty, by the mid seventeenth century, when representation was conceived as the chief form of participation, it was increasingly comprehended as a right. The chapter begins by discussing Niccolò Machiavelli’s notion of direct participation of the people, before moving to Northern Europe, where the idea of active citizenship was understood in more restrictive terms. Shunning popular political participation, citizenship was reserved for the elite.

Between the 1570s and 1680s, England established more than two dozen overseas colonies and trading posts throughout the world. In mainland North America, the colonies included Virginia, Maryland, Massachusetts and several other New England colonies, North and South Carolina, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. In the Caribbean and the North Atlantic, colonies were founded in Newfoundland, Bermuda, and Barbados, among several others, to which Jamaica was added by conquest in 1655. Various trading posts, or factories, were established—usually with the permission of the local populations—in Hudson’s Bay, India, Africa, and the East Indies. As a result of these activities, by the end of the seventeenth century, more than half a million English subjects, or about ten per cent of the nation’s population, lived across the seas.

The expression ‘divine right’ might sound obsolete to modern ears; indeed, it might recall images of an archaic and irrational society. In early modern Europe, things were far from it. As we shall see, divine right represented a systematically argued philosophical theory at the centre of which stood the justification for strong, earthly, power. Divine right is here understood in a specific political sense since it mainly concerns the authority of monarchs (not of bishops and not of republican governors). Such theory argued that God had given power ‘directly and immediately’ to kings, not to the people. Hence the ruler was accountable to none but God; had always to be obeyed; and held unlimited power (consequently, no form of resistance was legitimate). Divine right theory had at its core the idea, and the practice, of the individuality of kingly right, not of people’s individual rights. It expounded a subjective right, not an individual one.

Many of us might imagine that it was the early modern period during which an individual right to property was first conceived as something that we could claim against all other people and against the state itself. The reason we could do so is because such a right was grounded in natural law and therefore preceded the creation of political society. Indeed, the state, according to this account, was created to protect such rights. We would probably have John Locke in mind as the basis for this argument and it is true that such an account of the right to property could be derived from his work. However, Locke’s understanding of property was not typical in the early modern period. Instead, it was far more common for early modern political theorists to see the right to property as something that was established by civil society and therefore completely dependent upon the laws of the state.

Since Richard Tuck published his influential study The Rights of War and Peace in 1999, the works of the Italian civil lawyer and Regius professor of civil law at the University of Oxford, Alberico Gentili (1552-1608), have received much scholarly attention. Tuck presented Gentili as the foremost representative of the ‘humanist’ tradition in the domain of the law of war, and he also attempted to show that the early political writings the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius (1583-1643) wrote as ‘a major apology for the whole Dutch commercial expansion into the Indies’, were very much in this same tradition. Although Tuck referred in this context mainly to De Indis as well as to the first edition of De jure belli ac pacis of 1625 and conceded that Grotius introduced a different, more substantial account of human sociability in the later editions of his main work, his assessment of Grotius’ natural law theory has triggered numerous critiques and prompted scholars to compare Gentili’s and Grotius’ position on various issues.

Maior dignitas est in sexu virilis - the male sex has more dignity: this aphorism from Justinian’s Digest seems to be the reason why ‘in many parts of our law the condition of women is worse than that of men’, as we can read in a different passage. Affirming the inferior position of women in the law, these passages are often taken as the ‘official, generally consented stance’ of early modern gendered rights discourse. They seem to show that the respective legal conditions of men and women relate to the specific, innate characters of the sexes or, perhaps, their nature. It then might seem to us today that for early modern legal thinkers justifying sexual differentiations of rights was a straightforward undertaking; we might assume that early modern law and rights worked as male instruments of female subjugation that asserted and cemented a ‘natural’ hierarchisation of the sexes, which modernity slowly came to equalise.

This chapter considers how mid to late twentieth-century settler poets were reconceptualising place through bringing regionality to the fore, signalling the particularities of colonisation, and a nascent understanding of Country in the interconnectedness of lands, air and waterways. It argues that writers of this period were becoming aware of the sovereign custodianship in evidence around them and the embodied aspects of subjectivity. The chapter includes a discussion of the resonance of colonial violence and reflexive subjectivity that was appearing in the writing of Douglas Stewart, and the impressionistic locality and implication of their own presence in a poem by David Campbell. It analyses how poets such as Randolph Stow and Philip Hodgins navigate forms of discomfort in occupying violated places. The chapter then turns to the mediation on localities and their knowledge systems in the work of Laurie Duggan and PiO before turned to the representation of the littoral and affect in the poetry of Charles Buckmaster, Robert Gray and Robert Adamson. Lastly, it considers the optic poetics of Grace Perry, Jennifer Rankin and Jill Jones.

This chapter considers how Australian poetry of the 1970s participated in major social changes that were fuelled by a range of factors, including greater access to higher education, the sexual liberation movement, a drug subculture and Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War. It traces how Australian writers turned to America for influence and were able to utilise new technologies to generate a vibrant small press culture. The chapter outlines the surge in collaboration, collectives and overlapping literary circles. It also examines a series of anthologies that sought to feature new energies and voices, with some seeking to demarcate such poetry from earlier or more traditional forms. Lastly, it analyses the significance of the poetry workshops based at Melbourne’s La Mama Theatre, little magazines, and the development of small presses that produced poetry collections during the decade of the 1970s.