The early modern period was a formative time for rights of asylum as older forms of sanctuary came to be replaced by new rules and practices. Various forms of sanctuary had already existed in the ancient world. Both ancient Greece and Rome knew ‘sacred and inviolable spaces’, often associated with particular gods, where the law did not hold and the persecuted were able to hide. In early Christianity too, sacred places of worship served as places of asylum – a concept that was carried over into the Middle Ages, where church sanctuary could protect an individual from the force of the law and thus contributed to establishing the Church as a separate jurisdiction. This competing jurisdiction came increasingly under attack with the Protestant Reformation, when secular rulers centralised power in their own hands and church sanctuary was successively restricted and finally abolished.

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.

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.

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.

In the Middle Ages kingdoms could nominally reach very far, although kings typically did not have more resources than the most powerful feudal lords. Their mystical, sacred power ensured their right to rule over vast lands. The king obtained these attributes during the coronation, during which he simultaneously had to subjugate himself to the pope and the emperor. The coronation was an anchoring representant that enacted the God-given hierarchy in the cathedral: the laity was in the nave, the king in between the laity and the clergy, and the archbishop as the representative of the pope performed the unction with the holy balm through which the sacred entered the ceremony. It was the universal monarchy on stage. To rid themselves of papal and imperial superiority, while simultaneously maintaining their standing above feudal lords, kings modified the coronation and adapted other representants. This fundamental struggle led to a change in the early modern European order. During the Reformation, iconoclasms destroyed Catholic representants that upheld the hierarchical order. Simultaneously, kings adapted and repurposed existing Catholic representants for their own needs. The resulting dynastic divine right absolutism resembled the authority of pope and emperor, but it was territorially constrained.

The sixth volume in The Cambridge History of International Law covers the developments of inter- and transnational laws in early modern Europe (1492–1660). The preface explains how recent revisionism of traditional state- and Eurocentric views on the history of international law impacts the study of this subject and how this is reflected in the volume.

This chapter explores the views of prominent Western thinkers between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries who addressed the relationship between political thought and the historiography of international law. The chapter’s early modern chronological scope puts into sharp relief the precursors and originalities of the so-called nineteenth-century turn in international law’s historiography. A survey of consequential understandings of the link between international legal historiography and political thought finds that early modern thinkers systematically connected politics and international law by examining their shared epistemological, ontological and genealogical foundations, drawing interweaving lines of reasoning on how these fields are understood, and how they arise and evolve. Thus the arc of texts from Francisco de Vitoria to Jean Barbeyrac that specifically focus on this topic suggests that considerable sophistication existed before the nineteenth-century master narrative of international law’s historiography, and has been partly lost.

Volume 1 of The Cambridge History of Global Migrations documents the lives and experiences of everyday people through the lens of human movement and mobility from 1400 to 1800. Focusing on the most important typologies of preindustrial global migrations, this volume reveals how these movements transformed global paths of mobility, the impacts of which we still see in societies today. Case studies include those that arose from the demand for free, forced, and unfree labor, long- and short-distance trade, rural/urban displacement, religious mobility, and the rise of the number of refugees worldwide. With thirty chapters from leading experts in the field, this authoritative volume is an essential and detailed study of how migration shaped the nature of global human interactions before the age of modern globalization.

From 1720 to 1722, the French region of Provence and surrounding areas experienced one of the last major epidemics of plague to strike Western Europe. The Plague of Provence (or Great Plague of Marseilles) was a major disaster that left in its wake as many as 126,000 deaths, as well as new understandings about the nature of contagion and how best to manage its threat. Although the infection never left southeastern France, all of Europe, the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, and parts of Asia mobilized against its threat, and experienced its social, commercial, and diplomatic repercussions. Accordingly, this transnational study explores responses to this biological threat in some of the foremost port cities of the eighteenth-century world, including Marseilles, Genoa, London, Cádiz—the principal port for the Carrera de Indias or Route to the Indies – as well as some of the principal colonial towns with which these cities were most closely associated. In this way, this book reveals the ways in which a crisis in one part of the globe can yet transcend geographic and temporal boundaries to influence society, politics, and public health policy in regions far removed from the epicenter of disaster.

From 1720 to 1722, the French region of Provence and surrounding areas experienced one of the last major epidemics of plague to strike Western Europe. The Plague of Provence (or Great Plague of Marseilles) was a major disaster that left in its wake as many as 126,000 deaths, as well as new understandings about the nature of contagion and how best to manage its threat. Although the infection never left southeastern France, all of Europe, the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, and parts of Asia mobilized against its threat, and experienced its social, commercial, and diplomatic repercussions. Accordingly, this transnational study explores responses to this biological threat in some of the foremost port cities of the eighteenth-century world, including Marseilles, Genoa, London, Cádiz—the principal port for the Carrera de Indias or Route to the Indies – as well as some of the principal colonial towns with which these cities were most closely associated. In this way, this book reveals the ways in which a crisis in one part of the globe can yet transcend geographic and temporal boundaries to influence society, politics, and public health policy in regions far removed from the epicenter of disaster.

European society has long been wedded to narratives of progress, and many people believe that, despite increased economic inequality, the basic conditions of the majority have improved and rights have expanded. T. H. Marshall’s claim that political rights developed first and were later followed by socio-economic rights is ingrained in contemporary historiography. Yet, if we lengthen our historical perspective, we see that socio-economic rights predate not only the twentieth century but the entire modern period. From the Middle Ages, poverty was considered not only an economic but also a theological and legal condition. The rights of the poor were socio-economic in nature, encompassing necessities and legal representation. However, these rights were eroded in the sixteenth century, as new power structures and labour relations emerged and capitalism developed. By taking a long view, we see that the history of socio-economic rights is defined not by the inexorable march of progress but by moments of erosion, when the rights of the poor were suppressed, along with the history of poverty as a legal condition.

This chapter traces the practice of concluding peace treaties in Early Modern Europe, characterised by the increasing standardisation of clauses, as well as the influence of the concept of legal (or formal) war alongside that of just war. While just war retained an important role in the justification of war, treaty-making practice tended to rely on legal war, which produced a dualist logic in both war-waging and peace-making. Over time, the settlement of territorial conflicts moved from pre-existing claims and rights to conquest as a basis; dynastic legitimacy was subordinated to the raison d’etat. Increasingly standardised amnesty and restitution clauses, retractions of letters of reprisal, and provisions on prisoners of war likewise bore the influence of the legal war concept. Finally, to deal with the ever wider disruption caused by war, separate FCN treaties emerged alongside peace treaties. Later on, the 1919 Treaty of Versailles marked a brief return to a discriminatory concept of war, but its longer-lasting impact was on collective security and compensation of war damage for citizens.