Empire & Law

This year I’ve been a part of an Empire, Sovereignty, and Law reading group with a diverse group of scholars. I’ve learned a lot, and really enjoyed questioning what I’ve taken for granted. As this important conference at EUI reminds us, scholars often are at the mercy of their own definitions.

So far the reading list includes a few titles, and I’ve gone back to refresh my memory on a few others.

Lauren Benton, They Called it Peace: Worlds of Imperial Violence (Princeton University Press, 2024).

Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky, Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State (Stanford University Press, 2024).

Natasha Wheatley, The Life and Death of States: Central Europe and the Transformation of Modern Sovereignty (Princeton University Press, 2023).

Jeffrey S. Kahn, Islands of Sovereignty: Haitian Migration and the Borders of Empire (University of Chicago Press, 2018)

Julia Gaffield, The Racialization of International Law after the Haitian Revolution: The Holy See and National Sovereignty, The American Historical Review, Volume 125, Issue 3, June 2020, Pages 841–868. https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhz1226

David Todd, A Velvet Empire: French Informal Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton University Press, 2021)

Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through Twentieth-Century Europe (Harvard University Press, 2005).