The essays in this book sketch out the long-term history of what, since the nineteenth century, has been termed ‘humanitarian intervention’ – that is, action by governments (or, more rarely, by organisations) to prevent or to stop governments, organisations, or factions in a foreign state from violently oppressing, persecuting, or otherwise abusing the human rights of people within that state.

This chapter examines attitudes towards tyranny and extreme atrocities against foreign civilian populations in early modern Europe, and the measures that were both proposed and taken to end them. The period c. 1500–1700 was a vitally important one in the formulation of international law, concepts of sovereignty, and the emergence of the modern international system; and governments took what today would be termed humanitarian considerations into account in making foreign policy.

This chapter shows that, in the sixteenth century, a discourse against egregiously abusive government (‘tyranny’) emerged in influential treatises on political thought and the nascent ‘Law of Nations’. This theoretical consensus against extremes in government action was matched, to some extent, by state practice. Lawyers and statesmen, as well as philosophers and theologians, argued that tyranny and atrocity were illegitimate and that action to end them was legitimate in terms of the Law of Nations. Partly on the basis of such arguments, princes threatened or used force against regimes that egregiously ill-treated foreign civilian populations.

One of the most important conclusions of this collaborative historical investigation concerns the Westphalian concept of sovereignty. Our findings confirm those of Stephen Krasner and other scholars who argue that the alleged emergence of a new concept of state sovereignty after the treaties of Westphalia (1648) has been greatly exaggerated.

Closer historical investigation of the ‘recalcitrant’ question of sovereignty has shown it to have been a very relative term indeed. In particular, Krasner shows that what most scholars – and confusingly he – call ‘Westphalian Sovereignty’, the absolute freedom from intervention by an outside power, has in fact nothing to do with the Peace of Westphalia. The arrangements made there, he points out, enshrined minority rights at the expense of central sovereignty. One way or another, sovereignty has ‘always’ been violated throughout history.

Most recent criticisms of the supposedly Westphalian paradigm have been made from the explicit disciplinary perspectives of International Relations or Political Science, or on overtly political grounds. The historical studies in this volume confirm that the concept of Westphalia as originating a system of states whose sovereignty was absolute simply is not true, and that, in consequence, the idea that the modern international system derives solely from Westphalia is, at best, highly dubious. This means that the presumption of some vocal scholars, policy practitioners and human rights activists, that humanitarian intervention is illegitimate simply because it contravenes Westphalian principles, is not so much erroneous as baseless.