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.

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.

This chapter addresses the profound indebtedness of the Spanish Inquisition to its medieval predecessor. Both were grounded in the procedures and priorities of ancient Roman law. The text explains the concept of “heresy” within Christianity, as well as the ways in which medieval European rulers -- popes and monarchs -- worked together in an attempt to stamp out public, persistent, and intentional religious dissent. The essay charts the structural formation of the Spanish Inquisition after 1478, and examines the processes that were eventually standardized. It addresses questions of proof and legal discretion, as well as potential defense maneuvers by suspects. It raises the frequency of torture and describes more and less typical punishments, which Spanish inquisitors called “penances” in accordance with their overarching pastoral goals. Finally, this essay addresses the pivotal question of support for the Inquisition from below, namely, from ordinary Spaniards.

In Latin ius (like droit in French, diritto in Italian, Recht in German) can mean a whole body of normative rules, a legal order, as well as “right,” in the many senses of the English word. Early in the last century, Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld proposed that English speakers resolve the ambiguity about the meaning of “right,” at least in precise legal language, by using the word “right” only where there was a correlative “duty” in another or others. If there was no correlative duty, but simply an absence of right in someone else (a “no-right”), Hohfeld preferred to say that the subject had a “privilege.” Hohfeld also proposed four other “fundamental legal categories”: “power” (another word that is sometimes encompassed in “right”), “immunity” (also sometimes encompassed in “right”), “liability,” and “disability,” categories that referred to the subject’s ability or lack thereof to change the first set of categories.

The concept of rights as the bedrock of legal systems arose in modernity. This fact derives from a variety of contingent circumstances, some historical, others epistemological. Yet the building blocks from which the edifice of rights discourse is constructed were assembled and shaped in premodernity. The oldest strata in the quarry from which legal rights derive is surely classical, insights and postulates explored first by the Greeks beginning in the fifth century bce and incorporated into legal praxis through Roman law, particularly in the high imperial centuries. They were then kept alive and further developed in the late Middle Ages when the twelfth- and thirteenth-century glossators and in turn the fourteenth-century nominalist William of Ockham first articulated most of the principles out of which the sixteenth-century Spanish scholastics, seventeenth-century humanists, and eighteenth-century social contract theorists would develop full-fledged elaborations of rights-based law.

Is there anything in the ancient world that deserves to be called a “right” in the subjective sense? The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre stated quite apodictically that “there is no expression in any ancient or medieval language correctly translated by our expression ‘a right’ until near the close of the middle ages: the concept lacks any means of expression in Hebrew, Greek, Latin or Arabic, classical or medieval, before about 1400,” concluding from this that even if there were such rights, “no one could have known that there were.” Until relatively recently, historians would have agreed with MacIntyre. The prevailing view was that in antiquity we look in vain for what has come to be called subjective rights – that neither the concept of rights nor the word “right” could be encountered in the ancient world in its subjective sense.

Why does sovereignty need narrative? In modern political thought, sovereignty typically appears as an abstract concept unrelated to storytelling. It usually is defined as a state’s supreme authority over internal affairs and borders, the noninterference of other states in its domestic matters, and the mutual recognition of states as sovereign entities. This model of state sovereignty is used to explain our current world order, which itself is a product of European empire building and colonization, even though it does not accurately describe today’s international situation or political practices. Indeed, it may never have done so.

The first chapter explores the background to the 1600 Charter setting out the conditions for the establishment of the East India Company. Here I am interested in the rights of acquisition inherited from the exploratory age of the Tudor state rather than the more familiar story of its formal constitution. The language of charters granted to trading companies revealed something of the discursive complexity shaped by European powers striving to legitimize claims to overseas territory. England had few jurists of note and so the state drew partially and selectively on Roman and common law to foreground the precept of possession, not least because it conveniently rendered obsolete all challenges to the means of acquisition. The chartered companies of unprecedented size, capital and ambition which rose to power in the second half of the sixteenth century inherited this repertoire of legal pluralism but found in practice that the quest for conquest of overseas territory was compromised by geography and the existence of rival European powers with similar ambitions.

The concept of a ‘formula’ (Formel) plays an important, if complicated, role in Kant’s ethics, especially in the Groundwork. The concept of a formula also plays an important role in Stoic accounts of moral reasoning in the Latin sources, Cicero and Seneca. This chapter explores the place and function of this concept in Stoic ethics and its origins in Roman legal theory and practice. It then raises the question of the relationship between the Kantian and Stoic uses of the concept, asking whether this is a case of direct influence of Stoicism on Kant’s moral philosophy. The chapter comes to no definite conclusion on the question, but aims to provide comparative materials that may help others to address the question.

My introduction considers the rhetorical mechanics of Roman legal writing, and isolates three distinct discursive modes in which legal writing represents the world: the normative, the descriptive, and the constructive. I then discuss the ideological valence of law in the Roman imagination, with reference to Cicero’s description of the ideal magistrate as a “talking law.” I finally provide a plan of the work.