The Burdens of Empire: 1539 to the Present by Anthony Pagden (review)

The Burdens of Empire is a collection of essays by one of the most distinguished historians of European political thought and early modern empire. Comprised of nine chapters, of which only the introduction and chapter 6 are new, the collection represents in the words of the author, "all that I wish to preserve of what I have written on the political and legal theory of empire over the past fourteen years" (p. ix). While this could lead to a fragmented volume, the book's chapters complement each other well in that they all speak to what must be seen as the central theme of the volume, namely the European imperial roots of present-day notions of universal citizenship, international law, and Human Rights. In this way, the book is not about the "burdens" of empire—as the title misleadingly suggests—but about how the quest to justify European imperial expansion since Columbus made landfall in America gave rise to current values of an international community charged with upholding a universal law for all mankind.

This overarching argument unfolds through nine chronologically organized chapters. Chapter 1 opens with an examination of Francisco de Vitoria's efforts to develop legal and moral justifications for the Spanish conquest of the New World. Through a reworking of the Roman concept of the law of nations (ius gentium), Vitoria and other theologians of the School of Salamanca formulated an answer to the question of what "right" Spain had to subject indigenous populations to its rule. In so doing, they laid the foundation not only for future discussions of empire but also for international law. Ensuing chapters discuss further manifestations and interpretations of the law of nations to justify empire through the writings of a well-established cannon of European elite thinkers. Whole chapters are dedicated to Alberico Gentili, Hugo Grotius, and Immanuel Kant. Others are thematic. In one such, Pagden argues that "race" is a nineteenth-century concept that mattered little to the early modern empires of Spain, Britain, France, and Portugal, whose imperial ideologies "were grounded on the assumption of a single human nature" (p. 115). Another chapter centers on debates on justifications for English colonization. Chapter 6, the only new chapter in the book, offers an exploration of eighteenth-century debates on the reformability of the Spanish Empire into a modern commercial empire. Commerce as a valid substitute for conquest reemerges as a theme in chapter 8 on Enlightenment critiques of empire. The book's closing chapter examines the transition from the idea of "natural rights" to the twentieth-century concept of "human rights." Leitmotifs resonating throughout the book include the legacies of Roman Law, the distinction between "civilized" and "barbarian" populations, and discovery, conquest, and occupation as they pertain to the law of nations and international law. Pagden seamlessly connects these from one chapter to the next, which allows for an overall coherent exploration of the legal justifications of empire as they evolved over centuries and across the Spanish, French, Dutch, and English/British Empires. In this way, readers who yearn for more from the author of Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France c. 1500–c. 1800 (1995) will not be disappointed. Indeed, many of the thinkers that appeared in Lords of All the World reappear in this collection.

Pagden's efforts to link earlier justifications for empire to the present, however, also lead him to draw conclusions some of which are rather problematic. For instance, he comes perilously close to implying that we owe our present-day human rights' culture not just to Europe's exploitative empires but also to the white European male thinkers who endeavored to justify them. In other words, there is no recognition of an intellectual contribution from societies beyond Europe. None of the legal systems European colonial powers came into contact with, for instance through the slave trade or the dispossessing of indigenous populations in the...