In 1739, the author who wanted to go by the name of Sophia, A Person of Quality, published a text called Woman Not Inferior to Man: Or, A short and modest Vindication of the natural Right of the Fair-Sex to a perfect Equality of Power, Dignity, and Esteem, with the Men. This title gives voice to what has become an established way of thinking about the history of liberation, and of feminism in particular – that is, as a history of the vindication of rights, as Mary Wollstonecraft would go on to echo in her own titles, A Vindication of the Rights of Men in 1790, and then, when it appeared that women were not included in mankind, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792.

When early modern writers invoked the right of resistance their intentions were generally directed at addressing two fundamental ideas in the conceptual catalogue of political philosophy: sovereignty and liberty. Both of these concepts have played a major role in the history of political thought, each undergoing a crescendo in the late medieval period to become the dominant actors on the stage of early modernity. But their historical development cannot be separated from the dawn of certain ideas about resistance, which evolved in parallel and served as a fulcrum for debates about the origin and nature of political authority, as well as the boundaries and implications of subjection to political power. It was precisely through the construction and appeal to a right of resistance that many contemporary thinkers canvassed the fundamental questions of what is the state and what is its ultimate raison d’être.

The individual right to self-preservation took centre stage in many fiery debates in early modern Europe. At a time when appealing to nature, reason, and natural rights became far more common, self-preservation often took priority. Self-preservation as a principle of nature, a duty, and a right, eventually coalesced into an individual right closely tied to the right of self-governance, rights of war, and the right to rebellion. Such a right often seems to rest on tenuous grounds, empirically and morally, and contains within it often fraught tensions. At the time when it was rising to prominence in both use and power in seventeenth-century Europe, many of the tensions inherent in such a right were laid bare in open political and legal debates. This chapter tracks some of the ways the right to self-preservation was weaponized and conceptualized at this time and how this right, so fundamental to many other rights in this volume, invites questions crucial to our understanding of the modern individual’s relationship to society and to the state. Namely (1) what is dangerous? (2) what makes a life worth living? and (3) where are the boundaries of the self? The right to self-preservation gives us a unique window into the early modern divides over how to conceive of the self and its place in the legitimation of the social and political order.

This chapter aims to provide an introductory account of conceptions of natural rights in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. That is, of how human beings were considered to hold certain rights by virtue of their human nature or as conferred by natural law. It will show how conceptions of natural rights differed, as embedded in different theoretical frameworks, and were put to different political, social, and religious uses. At the same time, in several instances conceptions of natural right were used ‘in action’ in similar ways, despite the different theological or philosophical frameworks in which they were imbedded. Despite differences, then, early modern conceptions of natural rights shared some features, and were put to uses, that may seem counterintuitive to the modern reader.

Between 1500 and 1700, the right of groups and nations to trade were conceptualised and even enacted through a range of legal claims and practices. It is nevertheless possible and useful to make some generalisations about the rise and fall of the military, economic, political, religious and legal powers of various states and their conceptualisations of the right to trade. The primary texts bring out two salient distinctions, concerning the collective right to trade. Some commentators argued that the right to trade was limitable, while others considered it non-derogable. Another group of texts grounded the right to trade primarily in divine law, while others emphasised natural, international or municipal law.

Today, by freedom of religion we mean more or less the following: the principle that every individual has the right to believe in any religion she wants, including the right not to believe in any, and consequently the right to profess her belief or unbelief without being persecuted, discriminated against, or penalised in any way by the government. For most of us, this principle is not simply a cornerstone of our democracy, but also an essential component of our identity. In a sense, the right to freely choose what to believe without being persecuted for our choice is almost a sacred commandment that we all honour --and expect each other to honor-- in our secular, modern, and tolerant society.

It is a powerful question, that of the English writer Mary Astell in 1700: ‘If all Men are born free’, she asks, ‘how is it that all Women are born slaves’? What seems at first glance to be a striking statement of women's rights, however, Astell's words turn out to be a full-on attack on the liberal political theory of the rights-theorist, John Locke. Her presumption is that no person is ‘born free’; indeed, all are born under a condition of subjection to God. As Astell knew full well, in England, marriage stripped a woman of rights, those to property and those to her own person, to her sexuality and to control over her labor. Since this chapter is interested in the history of women's rights, it is best to consider what sorts of rights might be considered. Political rights, after all, are only one kind of right. And the category of women also presents challenges: a woman's marital position determined her rights.

The rights of peoples in Spain and its empire formed part of wider pan-European discussions, which were informed by both secular and religious normativities. According to those, the universe was the aggregate of constant and multiple exchanges. Though these exchanges were not necessarily equal nor simultaneous, they nonetheless formed the basic skeleton of all social, political, and legal interactions. Jurists and theologians who set out to explain how this system operated suggested that a pre-set order that was stable, prescriptive, and indisputable oversaw these exchanges. This order indicated the appropriate place for all peoples and things and gave each a particular function. It resulted in a constellation, which was not arbitrary, but instead corresponded to an objective situation, a ‘state of stability’ or an ‘unaltered condition.’

For Sultan Alau’ddin, the ruler of Gowa on South Sulawesi between 1596 and 1639, the freedom of the seas was paramount. His kingdom, centred on the city of Makassar, was ideally situated as a maritime crossroads between the Java Sea and the spice islands of Maluku. International traders, including Chinese, Malay, and European ships, frequented Makassar’s harbour, profiting from the policies of open navigation sanctioned by the sultan. Yet in 1615, another maritime power that recently had become active in the area, the Dutch East India Company (VOC), sought to undermine Makassar’s position by establishing a monopoly on the spice trade. When the conflict escalated, Sultan Alau’ddin sent a message to the Company’s governor-general and strongly repudiated Dutch attempts to restrict navigation and trade in the area: ‘God made the land and the sea; the land He divided among men and the sea He gave in common.

The Leveller John Lilburne spent repeated spells accused of sedition or treason between 1638 and 1653. He was both a lay lawyer and a cause lawyer, pursuing the full range of what he insisted were the procedural rights of anyone on trial on criminal charges. Though he sometimes pointed to the law of England to make these claims, he was more insistent and consistent in basing these rights on the laws of God, nature, and reason. In this way, he moved from national to natural modes of rights claiming—he argued for human rights. This essay draws on the scores of publications where he made these claims. He never convinced his judges to accept them. But he convinced his jurors and people in the streets. Centuries would pass before the procedural rights he promoted were accepted as law. These rights would be even more fully embraced around the globe in the major human rights declarations of the twentieth century.

There are many reasons why Roman law probably shouldn’t be included in a study tracing the origin of rights. Roman law, first of all, was the law of an ancient slaveholding civilization, built on a ruthless legacy of war and conquest. As any student of Roman law will know, slavery was interwoven into the fabric of Roman law, making it impossible to understand fully how the Roman legal system operated without recognizing the everyday legal reality of Roman slavery. Practically every aspect of Roman law depended on whether those subject to it were legally free or slave. Given this illiberal legacy of slavery and the basic inequality of status encoded into Roman law, it’s difficult to see how Roman law could plausibly serve as a model for theorizing rights.

Rights, in the Early Modern era, were conceived in terms of divine and natural law. They were understood to be powers, or faculties, belonging to an individual, or to communities, that had existed from the beginnings of time. The intellectual underpinnings of rights theory were derived from the moral theology of the scholastics, and lay in the idea that rights were a God-given power of the soul, and an expression of active virtue. This was true in the Medieval era, and it remained so in the Early Modern, when the origins of ideas about natural rights lay in the poverty controversies of the mendicant orders in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The appeal to the concept of a natural right was first and foremost a moral endeavour.

War and peace underwent radical changes in early modern Europe. Warfare itself, along with diplomacy and peace-making, changed dramatically during this period, but so too did the discussion of war and peace within the discursive domain of moral and juridical-political thought. Fundamental shifts in the early modern discussion of rights of war and peace occurred because previous assumptions were radically challenged by concrete events and experiences (such as the Reformation or the discoveries and occupation of new continents by Europeans). This in turn led to new ways of moral and political thinking which sought to find answers to these new challenges.

What were rights in seventeenth-century France, within the kingdom and its possessions? The French word ‘droits’ (rights) was rarely used. Jurists and claimants talked about liberties, privileges, exemptions, franchises. Liberties were understood in terms of entitlements, which were collective rather than personal. Subjects were granted different privileges depending on the order or estate to which they belonged. The clergy and the nobility enjoyed privileges denied to the common people (they did not, for example, pay taxes) because of the specific social roles they performed. People also enjoyed additional privileges and exemptions to the ones attached to their orders. They belonged to other groups, whether they were provinces, cities, communities, corporations, that granted specific privileges which the sovereign had to respect.

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.