AHR Forum Comment: Empire and Its Anxieties ANTHONY PAGDEN TWO RELATED, AND PERSISTENT, ANXIETIES followed the creation of Europe’s overseas empires, from the mid-sixteenth century, when the Spanish first became aware that they now had an empire in a remote and hitherto unknown region of the world to which no previous argument for occupation could apply, until almost the end of empire (or at least of colonial rule) in the 1960s. The first was caused by uncertainty over sovereignty, the second by the fear that whatever occurred, in no matter how distant a corner of the globe, would inevitably have consequences for what took place in the metropolis. Both are, perhaps, as old as empire itself. But the European em- pires from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, with which the three essays in this forum are concerned, faced them in a particularly acute form. The history of the sovereignty issue has traditionally been traced back to Francisco de Vitoria and Hugo Grotius, who figure prominently in the literature of international law in the nineteenth century as the founders of a modern positive law of nations, based upon a universal consensus. On this account, the law of nations, the ius gentium, was de- fined as that law upon which all rational beings supposedly could have agreed had what Cicero called “the republic of all the world” possessed a single legislative as- sembly. It was, as Grotius and many later jurists from Samuel Pufendorf to Emeric de Vattel claimed, a form of what the Glossators and Post-Glossators had originally called a “secondary” natural law. This made it inescapably universal, but it also left its actual content usefully imprecise. Grotius’s famous claim that the natural law— and thus by implication the law of nations—was “unchangeable, even in the sense that it cannot be changed by God,” meant also that it could easily be detached from the kind of religious determinism that had accompanied many of the early European justifications for empire. 1 It was with this legacy that the liberal theorists of the nineteenth century, and even to some degree the twentieth, despite the complete dismantling of the entire epistemological edifice of the “natural law” by Immanuel Kant and then G. W. F. Hegel, had to contend. The writers with which these essays are concerned had, then, inherited a long and powerful tradition with which all of them were thoroughly familiar. It was its status as a body of laws which, in Jennifer Pitts’s words, were at once “both distinctively European and also universalist in their aspirations” that allowed the law of nations to become the platform upon which a number of ambitious projects for a peaceful, 1 Hugo Grotius, De iure belli ac pacis, I, 40. 141 by guest on August 26, 2016 http://ahr.oxfordjournals.org/ Downloaded from