The birth of territory: a review forum

Journal of Historical Geography 50 (2015) 109e118

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The birth of territory: a review forum The Birth of Territory, Stuart Elden. University of Chicago Press, Chicago (2013). 493 pages, $90 hardcover, $30 paperback Introducing territory Stephen Legg, University of Nottingham In this daunting, impressive and inspiring work Stuart Elden seeks to answer, after the briefest of nods to contemporary ‘territorial’ conflicts, the following questions: ‘What is being fought over, divided, mapped, distributed, or transformed? Where did this idea of exclusive ownership of a portion of the earth's surface come from?’ (pp. 2e3). 326 pages later he finds a succinct and recognisable answer to the first question in the writings of Rousseau: ‘To be in [the] territory is to be subject to sovereignty; you are subject to sovereignty while in [the] territory, and not beyond; and territory is the space within which sovereignty is exercised: it is the spatial extent of sovereignty. Sovereignty, then, is exercised over territory: territory is that over which sovereignty is exercised’ (p. 329). He argues that, since Rousseau wrote this, the definition of territory has remained fundamentally unchanged. It is with his second question (‘where did this idea … come from?’) that the book is concerned. To discuss Elden's answer to this question I convened a session at the 2014 Annual International Conference of the Royal Geographical Society-Institute of British Geographers. Here Elden responded to commentaries by James Sidaway, Briony McDonagh and Mike Heffernan. The latter two provide commentaries below, drawing upon their expertise in, respectively, early modern and modern historical geographies of Europe. These two pieces are complemented by perspectives from beyond Geography, by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Professor of English and specialist in medieval studies and ecotheory; and Saskia Sassen, Professor of Sociology and specialist in globalisation and territory studies. The aim here is to bring together commentaries on the various historical periods that Elden addresses and to reflect upon the broader methodological and theoretical consequences of the book within and beyond Geography. Elden's methodology draws selectively from: Michel Foucault, seeking out the meaning of terms through their discursive construction in particular times and places, and seeking out the effects through time of these terms on bodies and spaces; J.G.A. Pocock and Quentin Skinner, on the relationships between words and concepts, and on the historical contexts in which texts were written and used; and Reinhart Koselleck on the relationship between words and concepts, between meaning and designation. As such, one of the guiding distinctions in the book is that between genealogy and etymology, and the book's insistence is on the former and not the latter. Indeed, the book itself could be considered an antietymology. Time after time we find an historical usage of a word which could be translated as territory, but which refers to http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2015.08.012 0305-7488

something other than the mid eighteenth-century definition above. Meanwhile, other terms are explored which verge closer to our definition of territory but whose words have different meanings when translated into the contemporary lexicon. What we have is more of a genealogy that, when it deploys etymology, puts it to work: ploughed through fields; raised in walls; tumbled in wars; and, eventually, written into law. In pursuing the words and practices that led up the modern conception of territory Elden takes us back to the polis and khora of ancient Greece, through the urbis and imperium of Rome, through the poetical and theological reflections on the fragmentation and political reorganisation of medieval Europe, to the Renaissance and Reformation, bringing us not only to political arithmetic and sovereignty, but also to King Lear. For the reader of the Journal of Historical Geography there is much to cherish and lose oneself in here. Amongst my favourite gems were the tracing of the transition from a Church that didn't want to be a Caesar to a Church willing to forge documents to become so; the evolving nature of feudalism and its pivotal relationship to land; the rediscovery of Aristotle and its impacts on moral philosophy; and Elden's rearticulation of his criticism of Foucault's conclusions on territory. The reviewers here assembled give many examples of the richness of Elden's text, while Mike Heffernan's contribution will give a further overview of the book's contents. In my remaining few words I would like to raise some questions about the trans-historical method Elden deploys. This is not to question how he examines concepts, words or practices, but the analytical background against which he does so. Having examined the deficiencies of existing works on territory and associated terms like territoriality, land and terrain, Elden concludes that territory requires what Edward S. Casey did for place, an historical and philosophical analysis.1 In terms of structure, Elden in some senses follows Casey's book, which traced the notion of place and space from ancient thought through medieval and Renaissance speculations to early modern and post-modern thought. But while Casey tracks the changing nature of place throughout the millennia, just as Elden does with territory, for the latter ‘place’ comes to be deployed as a constant concept with which to examine inconstant ‘territory’. So, ‘In examining the relation between place and power-to use these terms as relatively neutral for the moment e in a wide range of historical settings and texts, I show how the concept of territory emerged within Western political thought and practice’ (p. 6). Territory, he explains, then becomes the way in which relations between place and power are described.

1

E. S. Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History, Berkeley, 1997.

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The neutrality of place and power is, however, not used for just a moment, it recurs throughout the book. Elden explains that ‘In examining the relation between place and power, this study looks at the history of Western political thought to try to trace the emergence of this political technology [territory]’ (p. 16). We are told that ‘In tracing the relation between place and power e the prehistory of the concept of territory e ...’ (p. 100) Elden's desire is to treat the medieval world in its own terms. Studying the geography of the Middle Ages is said to be useful in ‘understanding the complicated relations of history, politics, and geography, and especially the relation between place and power’ (p. 102). The Domesday Book and feudalism are, likewise, crucial issues in thinking about the relation between place and power. Two key themes in the fourteenthcentury writer Bartolus's works concern place and power, while two hundred years later, for Renaissance writers, ‘the question remains that which has motivated this study from the outset: what is the relation between place and power in their thought?’ (p. 244) Other relations of place and power are acknowledged to have existed, but little sense is given of power or place changing themselves over these millennia. There are few writers in Geography who have thought as carefully about power as Elden so this is a surprising position, and there are certainly cracks in the façade. Early on Elden states of the book that ‘Taking a broad historical period e ancient Greece to the seventeenth century e it traces the relation between politics and place in a range of different texts and contexts’ (p. 10). But on the following page it is also claimed that the book will look at how place and power were understood in these different contexts too, and that territory will be shown to emerge from these debates. We do, it is true, get some work on Augustine's conception of space (spatium) and place (locus), and on Newton's sense of place as a part of space. But the sense throughout is that if the richly mined and portrayed context and detail were bracketed out we would be able to pinion each turn of territory between two trans-historical phenomena of power and place. If territory was never there, why were place and power? Genealogies, choices, consequences and languages Michael Heffernan, University of Nottingham Stuart Elden's The Birth of Territory is a brilliant book e exhilarating, intimidating and occasionally exhausting. Although its scope transcends any particular discipline, it bears comparison with the best works on the history of geography and is arguably the most accomplished work in this field since Clarence Glacken's Traces on the Rhodian Shore, a book with which it has much in common in terms of its intellectual ambition, historical range and scholarly depth.2 The Birth of Territory charts the ‘genealogy’ of the concept of territory: bounded, measurable and regulated terrestrial space, simultaneously the subject and the object of sovereignty and governance. According to Elden, the modern concept of territory can best be understood as a ‘political technology’, a phrase that reveals the influence of Ernst Kantorowicz, Carl Schmitt and, especially, Michel Foucault. By using this term, Elden seeks to emphasise how territory became an important practice of governance and sovereignty, distinctive from related but narrower concepts such as ‘land’ and ‘terrain’ that acquired their own political-economic and politicalstrategic associations. Elden's subject, ‘the interrelation of legal, political, religious, and

2 C. J. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century, Berkeley, 1976.

geographical themes’ (p. 216), is encapsulated by Luigi Serra's late nineteenth-century painting, Irnerio che glossa le antiche leggi, a full colour version of which adorns the front cover of The Birth of Territory. Serra's painting, which hangs today in the Museo d’Arte Moderna in Bologna, shows the late eleventh-century Italian jurist Irnerius seated on a massive throne in an imagined city, head bowed in fierce concentration over his legal tomes. Branches from a tree of knowledge appear in the foreground while a vast army looms into view beneath a glowering sky on the surrounding plains that stretch into the distance. Elden's analysis begins in classical Greece where he examines the concepts of polis (city-state) and khora (the lands beyond the polis), and the Athenian myth of autochthony in Homer, Aeschylus, Euripides (notably in the surviving fragments of his play Antigone), Plato, and in Aristotle's Politics. The related Roman concepts of urbis and imperium are then explored through Caesar, Cicero, Sallust, Livy, Tacitus and Augustus and in relation to Roman ideas of the terrain of war, the res publica, and the outer limes of the Empire. The proto-territoriality of the post-Roman world is examined by reference to Augustine's De Civitate Dei, the works of Boethius and Isidore of Seville, and in the Old English epic poem Beowulf. The early sixteenth-century painting of the Donation of Constantine by assistants of Raphael (probably Gianfrancesco Penni or Giulio Romano), which shows an entirely invented fourth-century ‘event’ when the Emperor Constantine handed over control of Rome and the western Roman Empire to the Pope (Sylvester), provides the starting point for Elden's discussion of territory in the preReformation Catholic Church with reference to Charlemagne's accession as Holy Roman Emperor in 800 AD and the early cartographic representations of Rome, Jerusalem and a still vaguely defined Christian realm. In two chapters on Catholic territoriality, the first entitled (in an obvious nod to Kantorowicz) ‘the Pope's Two Swords', Elden works through John of Salisbury's mid twelfth-century Policraticus, the works of Aristotelian medieval theologians such as Thomas Aquinas, the bitter feud between Pope Boniface VIII and Philip the Fair, the ‘Iron King’ of France, and the writings of Dante Alighieri (who famously placed the former protagonist in the eighth circle of hell in The Divine Comedy), Marsilius of Padua and William of Ockham. Elden's focus then shifts from theological to legal texts, from the Roman legal systems of the eastern Byzantine Empire under Justinian in the sixth century through the writings of the early fourteenth-century Italian jurist Bartolus of Saxoferrato to those of Machiavelli, More, Bodin, Erasmus, Montaigne, Botero and Shakespeare. Early modern territorium was redefined by imperial expansion, Elden claims, into the modern concept of empire. In his final chapter, on ‘the Extension of the State’, Elden considers territory under the Reformation and the ‘Scientific Revolution’ with reference to Cartesian geometry and the works of Hooker, Knichen, Bacon, Spinoza, Descartes, Hobbes, Filmer, Locke and Leibniz, culminating in a mid seventeenth-century Westphalian moment when the sovereign became ‘the master of territory’. It should be abundantly clear from this summary that The Birth of Territory is not a book for the casual or faint-hearted reader. Elden demands a great deal from his audience and provides limited biographical detail on the many, often obscure characters he discusses. The 2750 endnotes, set forth across almost 150 pages of densely packed text seem, on first impression, ostentatious and deliberately intimidating. A single chapter, on Rome, is accompanied by more than 450 endnotes. But the benefits of a careful and patient reading soon become obvious, especially in the endnotes which are richly informative and often highly entertaining. The University of Chicago Press are to be commended for allowing a dedicated and serious author to include this quantity of bibliographical detail. A consolidated bibliography would have been useful, though as this

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would have included c. 5000 references its omission is not entirely surprising. The structure of The Birth of Territory raises questions about how to read such a rich and complex work. As I tracked back and forth between the main text and the endnotes, hunched in concentration like Irnerius in Serra's painting, pausing repeatedly for protracted internet and bibliographical searches, it eventually dawned on me that I would never finish the book, although I was impressed how well my paperback copy handled all the to-ing and fro-ing. I eventually decided to concentrate on the main text and consider the endnotes only when I had completed an initial reading. This brought home the physical, almost sensual engagement required to bring together a determined reader and a complex text. When so much material is now ‘read’ online in a cascading torrent of words on the computer screen, The Birth of Territory reminds us of the traditional pleasures of a weighty scholarly volume from which complex ideas are absorbed physically and corporeally, through arms, hands and fingertips, as well as the more obvious mental pathways. There is so much to admire in The Birth of Territory, it's difficult to know where to start. Although the book is framed by reference to recent theorists, Elden's analysis is grand intellectual history of the best, and most traditional, kind. This not remotely intended as a criticism; quite the opposite, in fact, for it is a delight to encounter an intellectually ambitious book that deploys familiar and unfamiliar texts in a straightforward chronological sequence to develop an argument about a particular, albeit expansive theme. Elden's challenge was to keep that theme firmly in mind. If some passages read like a general history of Western political philosophy, the territorial focus is never suspended for long. My engagement with this impressive volume left me with four related questions about its genealogical framing, the selection of evidence, its historical and political consequences, and the lessons it provides for geographical research on language. Birth Pains? Elden's insistence that his book uncovers the ‘birth’ of territory is, of course, another more or less explicit acknowledgement of his debt to Foucault who famously used the expression ‘naissance’ to make similar ‘archaeological’ and ‘genealogical’ arguments in regard to his early writings on the clinic and of the ‘regard dical’ and in his later lectures on the ‘naissance de la biome politique’. While I appreciate the rhetorical force of this term, I share some of the concerns of Foucault's critics, including Richard Rorty, who have expressed reservations about a genealogical ‘history of the present’ as an essentially negative, retrospective perspective, one that is initially considered in a reverse sequence and then written more or less chronologically from the past to a pre-figured critical moment, in Elden's case the mid seventeenth century. Although The Birth of Territory provides a breathtakingly novel account of how modern territory came into being, it is ultimately based on a somewhat conventional argument about a ‘turning point’ in the mid seventeenth century when the modern state system was enacted. Despite its theoretical sophistication, this is a surprisingly traditional viewpoint that perhaps undersells what Elden has provided. Those who question the significance of the Westphalian moment might reasonably feel that Elden has given us far more than an account of the ‘birth’ of territory. Rather, he has provided a larger story that traces this concept from ‘twinkle in the eye’ origins in the classical world through its conception, gestation and birth in Europe into its infancy, childhood and adolescence when the idea was poised to expand onto the global scale. Choices? At each stage in his inquiry Elden seeks to identify whether, and in what forms, a version of the modern concept of territory was articulated in writings from the period under consideration. Whether definitive historical conclusions can be derived from research that can never be fully exhaustive, even for a scholar

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as indefatigable as Elden, is a moot point. The argument ultimately rests on an assumption that the evidence is representative of the periods and contexts in which it was produced. Other texts might have required different analyses and generated different conclusions. Elden's focus on theological, legal and philosophical texts, whether published at the time they were written or much later, is probably unavoidable but one wonders whether non-textual evidence, including cartography from periods other than those that are considered by Elden, would have generated the same history outlined in The Birth of Territory. Elden also says relatively little, even in his immensely generous footnotes, about the work of other historians who have considered territory and territoriality not as an exercise in intellectual history but in order to understand, for more conventional historical reasons, how modern states and state systems have developed. I suspect there are references to Robert Bartlett buried somewhere in Elden's endnotes, but his work on ‘the making of Europe’ provides an obvious historical affirmation of how Elden's ideas on territory became manifest in actual geopolitical changes ‘on the ground’ during the medieval period. Likewise, the more directly political implications of Elden's conceptual discussion of the concept of territory as it was expanded into oceanic spaces after the Renaissance is central to the work of legal historians such as Lauren Benton. What Came Next? It is perhaps the ultimate compliment to this fine book that I wanted to know more about how ideas of territory and territoriality were reshaped after the mid seventeenth-century finale of Elden's analysis, particularly under the regimes of European absolutism that developed between the treaties of Westphalia and the peace of Utrecht. The Westphalian system was tested to destruction in this period by the armies of Louis XIV and it would be interesting to know how the concept of territory changed as a result. Hints are provided by historians of French absolutism such as Chandra Mukerji, who has written brilliantly on ‘territorial ambitions’ and the gardens of Versailles and on the spatial histories of the Canal du Midi, and Jake Soll, whose work on Colbert's information revolution has an implicitly spatial form. And of course Newtonian mathematics provided a new language in these decades that allowed the territory of the earth to be connected conceptually and empirically to a wider cosmos through regimes of calculation and measurement. Elden's account charts the early stages in a much longer historical process by which the concept of territory moved from the realm of ideas expressed in texts and on maps to a hard-wired assumption in the collective consciousness of humanity as a whole. The Birth of Territory is an account of the conditions that make it possible to interpret the world in a particular way but it is also, and more importantly, a story of how and why it is now seemingly impossible to think, see or perceive the world in alternative ways. The power of territory to control the actions of states and individuals emerged when it transcended the genealogy described by Elden to become something else entirely e a force that no longer requires a self-conscious awareness of its own history. It is, I suspect, the very banality of territory that now gives the concept its power. Elden's exploration of the deep and tangled historical roots of this concept was an urgent and important task but the next step is surely to examine how territory became less a concept than an unavoidable, unchallenged and taken-for-granted mind-set. Towers of Babel? The Birth of Territory makes an urgent, though largely implicit methodological point about the role of language in intellectual history. This is a message that geographers, arguably more so than representatives of other disciplines, need seriously to consider. Elden repeatedly insists on the need to trace words, and associated ideas and practices, through different languages to points of departure, demonstrating along the way how acts of translation were creative rather than passive processes that

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continually rearticulated the relationships between words and ideas. This echoes an argument made many years ago by the Cambridge geographer Robin Donkin in his friendly critique of the work carried out over many decades by his mentor Carl Sauer. As Donkin pointed out, while Sauer was able to work comfortably in at least four languages (English, German, Spanish and French), he rarely used language as a methodology in a more systematic way to chart how words, and through them concepts and practices, ‘diffused’ between societies and across space and time. Donkin's own concerns with diffusion and adaptation were, by contrast, shaped precisely and consistently by reference to language and processes of translation. I think this has enormous significance for geographical work today as our discipline has long been crippled by a lamentable ignorance of languages other than the globalised English now universally deployed. Elden's work demonstrates how examining languages e and more specifically acts of translation e is an important methodology in tracing the historical geographies of ideas. Property, land and territory Briony McDonagh, University of Hull The Birth of Territory is undoubtedly an important book. There is much to praise in Elden's careful and detailed exploration of the origins and development of territory, a vital but under-examined concept. Throughout its almost five hundred pages, Elden weaves a complex narrative about the development of one of the big ideas in Western political thought, sketching out the various twists and turns in a very ‘long and complicated story’ (p. 330). For Elden, the complicated relations between territory as a word, concept and practice can only be understood in historically and geographically specific ways. That is of course exactly what the book sets out to do, and ultimately does very well. It is erudite and dense, offering a detailed examination of the writings of key thinkers and their contribution to the modern notion of territory as it finally emerged sometime in the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century. There is a huge amount to commend in the longue dur ee approach, broad geographical remit and careful analysis of a huge range of historical texts, as well as in Elden's insistence on the importance of understanding sources in their original contexts rather than reading backwards from the twenty-first century. From the perspective of a historical geographer of the (long) early modern, it is exactly the kind of book it is good to see is still being written. Different readers will inevitably be drawn to different aspects of the book, but in being offered the chance to comment critically on it, there are two themes on which this review will dwell. The first revolves around questions of property and the second concerns popular geographical imaginations and experiences. Both issues are of crucial importance to the work done by historical geographers and historians of early modern and modern Europe, whilst also of significance to a wider reading of the book and the themes which it aims to elucidate. The idea of property looms large in the book. The introduction opens with a quote from Jean-Jacques Rousseau's (1754) Discourse on the Origin of Inequality where he discusses the appropriation of land, specifically the fencing off and enclosing of a portion of the earth's surface as private property. Rousseau, of course, recognized the violence implicit in this, a theme Elden returns to in the Coda at the end of the book. Property also figures strongly in chapter 9, the final substantive chapter of the book, where Locke's writings on property in his Two Treatises on Government (1690) are expertly discussed. Yet the concept of property remains under-theorized in the book and the relations and interactions between territory and other important geographical concepts e including property e are little explored. While territory is seen as an historically and

geographically specific concept, property isn't e a point also made by Gerry Kearns in his review of the book for Environment and Planning D: Society and Space.3 The crucial point here is that just as ‘territory’ meant something very different in different times and places, so too did ‘property’. English medieval concepts of property differed from modern ones in several important ways, not least that the concept of property applied only to goods and chattels not to land. At the same time, the common law equated property not with the thing itself but with rights in or over the thing. Thus multiple individuals or groups might have rights in a single strip of open-field land, without necessarily owning it in the modern sense: the lord had rights to the minerals and timber, the tenant to the crops, the poor to gleanings and the wider community to grazing for their animals. Only in the late fifteenth century did the abstract Romanized concept of property begin to (re)emerge and a universal law of property begin to be applied to both land and chattels. This was parallelled by land use changes e including enclosure e whereby common rights were extinguished and multiple use rights increasingly attached to a single legal owner. As a result, property gradually emerged as a spatially exclusive, bounded concept over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, though the modern notion of absolute property was only really fully concretized after the parliamentary enclosures of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.4 Enclosure, in fact, receives very little attention in the book. It is mentioned in the discussion of feudalism in chapter 4, where it is suggested that ‘as population increased and political control developed, large areas of previously open or common land were enclosed, with farmers or lords claiming exclusive rights over them’ (p. 154). There seem to be few other references to enclosure as an ideology or practice, and as a standalone statement this brief passage risks both over-simplifying and misdating enclosure, at least as it was experienced in many parts of Europe. While enclosure was certainly ongoing in England from at least the thirteenth century, the process increased in intensity only in the sixteenth century, continued throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and was largely completed by around 1830. Elsewhere in Europe, for example in Scandinavia and Eastern Europe, enclosure didn't take place until well into the nineteenth century. But does it really matter that property is under-theorized in the book? Importantly, it's more than a quibble about chronology. Thinking critically about the concept and practice of property is important in understanding the relationship between land, law and capitalism, itself crucial to ideas about territory. More significantly, the book seems to miss how important the emergence of modern property rights and associated land use changes were to new thinking about the territorial state and geometrical space as they emerged in the seventeenth century. Chapter 9 offers a brilliant overview of the development of new concepts of geometrical space as found in the work of Descartes, Hobbes and Newton amongst others. For Elden, Descartes' Geometry presents a radically

3 http://societyandspace.com/reviews/reviews-archive/elden/, accessed on 29th May 2015. 4 Readers interested in medieval and early modern conceptions of property should see D.J. Seipp, The concept of property in the early common law, Law and History Review 12 (1994) 29e91; M. Sampson, ‘Property’ in seventeenth-century English political thought, in: G.J. Schochet, P.E. Tatspaugh and C. Brobeck (Eds), Religion, Resistance and Civil War: Papers Presented at the Folger Institute Seminar, Washington, 1990, 259e275; G.E. Aylmer, The meaning and definition of ‘property’ in seventeenth-century England, Past and Present 86 (1990) 87e97; J. Brewer and S. Staves (Eds), Early Modern Conceptions of Property, London, 1996. For more detail on the arguments rehearsed here, see B. McDonagh, Subverting the ground: private property and public protest in the sixteenth-century Yorkshire Wolds, Agricultural History Review 57 (2009) 191e206.

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new view of space as ‘measurable, mappable, strictly demarcated, and thereby controllable’ (p. 291), a way of thinking central to modern notions of the territorial nation-state. Elden's careful delineation of Descartes' notion of ‘extension’ is tremendously useful to anyone thinking about the emergence of abstract concepts of space, just as his assertion that Euclidean space is a ‘mis-nomer’ is a timely reminder to those who may not always have applied this term correctly (this reviewer included). Nevertheless, chapter 9 makes little reference to the legal, economic and social changes ongoing in parts of Europe e perhaps especially in England e during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and we gain few insights into how changes in the legal basis of landholding impacted upon the work of the political theorists discussed in the book. More generally, there is at times a slight disconnect between the key figures in Elden's story about the birth of territory and the material world around them, between the texts and real world geographies, a point which brings us round to the second of the themes of this review: the question of popular notions of space and place. What does all that we learn about territory e and we do learn a staggering amount e tell us about how ordinary men and women understood and experienced the spaces and landscapes around them? In focussing on political thinkers and their theories of territory, The Birth of Territory doesn't really engage with popular thought and practice. This is of course entirely logical given both the spatial and temporal scale of the book and the sources used. Elden is interested in big questions about sovereignty, majesty, the political make-up of the Holy Roman Empire and the birth of the modern nation-state, rather than the kinds of smaller scale, everyday spaces, buildings and landscapes which some historical geographers and historians e particularly those influenced by the so-called ‘spatial turn’ e are increasingly addressing. Yet if the sources Elden draws on offer relatively little scope for talking about everyday experiences of space, there are nevertheless interesting hints in the book about how one might approach such questions, ideas which Elden touches on but doesn't develop further, instead leaving them to others to take up and run with. Late in the book, there's brief mention of Richard Hooker's account of the laying out of English parishes included for the light it sheds on Hooker's use of territory to reformulate the relations between political and religious power in the wake of the English Reformation. Now Hooker was almost certainly wrong about how and when English parishes were laid out e dating what was most likely a pre-Conquest process to much later in the medieval period e but the creation of a system of discrete and bounded parish territories must surely have been important in shaping ordinary's people's geographical imaginations. It is an event e or more properly, a long gradual process e for which evidence is as yet extremely scanty, but one which might nevertheless be worthy of further exploration. In chapter 4, there is reference to hides, oxgangs and yardlands, measures of land which Elden rightly suggests were important instruments of social and economic power. That these terms and concepts were eventually abandoned in favour of the acre prompts interesting questions about what the shift from oxgangs to acres as a unit of land measurement e and the associated mental shift from assessing land in terms of time spent ploughing to an abstract measure of area e reveals about emerging notions of space, property and territory across medieval and early modern Europe. Again the evidence to answer such questions is likely to prove hard to find, but it would be fascinating to consider what light the huge number of political and legal texts analyzed by Elden might shed on these and other related avenues of research (though this would of course require someone of his impressive linguistic abilities!). This then is a book which both offers a compelling account of the development of the concept of territory in the Western world

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over more than two millennia and a useful jumping off point for other questions about understandings and experiences of space, place, power and politics in the same period. The Birth of Territory should be essential reading for geographers, historians and political theorists alike, not least because the extensive endnotes reference a huge array of both primary and secondary texts. These make rich pickings for researchers keen to follow up on any of the range of themes elucidated in the book, or indeed to take up Elden's ideas in new and potentially exciting directions. Most importantly however, the book is a pleasure to read, well written, thought provoking and scholarly in all the very best ways. It is a book to return to time and time again e and I will. Emergence and territory Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, George Washington University When a book is published detailing the history of some crucial contemporary concept, medievalists brace themselves. We have learnt from long experience to expect that such a volume is at best likely to pretend the Middle Ages did not unfold, at worst to demonize that long expanse. The period between 500 and 1500 CE is often assumed to be an interlude during which little of lasting consequence occurred, besides the loss of that storehouse of classical knowledge that had to be restored for the Renaissance to arrive. Many of us are still smarting from the accolades, popular as well as scholarly, accorded Stephen Greenblatt's The Swerve: How the World Became Modern e a book that argues that most every aspect of modernity was suppressed during a Church dominated medieval millennium. Luckily a scrappy book collector came along, recovered the sole surviving copy of Lucretius's De Rerum Natura, and thereby enabled people to stop scourging themselves and think once more in a secular mode. Scholars have variously argued that a relentlessly moralizing, relentlessly theological Middle Ages did not possess a sense of individuality or self; a notion of childhood; embodied race; sexual identities; disability; a divide between nature and culture; secularism; atheism; feminism; anti-Semitism (as opposed to anti-Judaism); historical self-consciousness; an idea of corporate Europe; nationalism; tolerance; empathy. The list could be multiplied, but the point should be clear: the standard method of tracing the intellectual history of a modern concept is to short circuit the Middle Ages, dismissing a thousand years of richly heterogeneous history (and a vast, non-unified geography) to inconsequentiality e or, worse, to posit the medieval as actively inimical, full of impedimental forces that had to be circumvented. This narrative manoeuvre makes books easier to write, but consigns a fertile archive e and the lived experience of millions e to irrelevance. Medievalists are therefore used to being left out of intellectual history. The good news is that they will find much to like about Stuart Elden's The Birth of Territory, which maps the long, fraught and distributed ‘emergence’ (rather than sudden advent) of that concept. The ‘birth’ in the book's title does not convey a story of simple origins, and rather than start in the eighteenth century, the work ends there. The Renaissance does not arrive until chapter 8, and the substantial analysis that precedes explores Greek and Roman materials, Augustine of Hippo, Isidore of Seville, Boethius, Gregory of Tours, Beowulf, the Donation of Constantine (both as a document with profound historical effects and a forgery eliciting philology), Nicholas of Cusa, cartography in its relation to the Crusades, John of Salisbury, the temporal and spiritual powers of the papacy, the rediscovery of Aristotle through Arabic translations, Thomas Aquinas, Dante and William of Ockham. And that's just a partial list. Elden teases out through a heterogeneous collection of texts, mostly composed in Latin, the difficult relations among people, land, measurement, control, sovereignty and law. Territory,

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he writes, designates ‘a word, concept and practice,’ the complex interrelation among which ‘can only be grasped with historical, geographical, and conceptual specificity’ (p. 328). On the one hand, territory is knowable only under specific, determinate conditions e ensuring that whatever is meant by the term or its precursors in ancient Greece, newly Christian Rome, the Carolingian court, and Dante's Florence is going to vary widely. On the other, ‘territory’ will always carry with it a polychronic density, a sedimented history of its multiple possibilities across long stretches of time. Elden generally focuses upon the former, emphasizing change over time, in the tradition of a Foucaultian genealogy of the ‘conditions of possibility of things being as they are’ (p. 8), but with far more emphasis upon how and why such change occurs. Emergence, in other words, is a continued coming into being marked by sometimes sudden variation within long continuities. The Birth of Territory thereby demonstrates the historical fragility of concepts that can seem timeless. By asking how the idea of ‘exclusive ownership of a portion of the earth's surface’ became so natural, the book also quietly urges a rethinking of (among other things) the push to secure the Arctic for national resources as the polar ice caps melt. ‘Territory’ differs from ‘territoriality’ (the mammalian instinct, seemingly trans-historical, to delimit area) and ‘land’, which is a ‘finite resource that is distributed, allocated and owned’ (p. 9). Never active, land does not push back, ally or impress itself on humans (but as an ecocritic I have to ask: but what if it does? Is land really so inert, so still?). Territory marks the extension of group power, usually in the form of a state, into a bounded area through varied political technologies that include law, for controlling land, and cartography, for delimiting terrain (p. 322e323). Power in action, territory is intimate to contemporary state formation and latent within earlier forms of governmentality. Like most concepts important to moderns, territory seems to be always emerging (despite a ‘detour on the path’ or two, p. 161), but never until modernity quite arrived. Thus Beowulf is read as a poem in which land is a protagonist. Citing the important scholarship of Nicholas Howe, Elden likewise describes the poem as ‘profoundly a work about place,’ especially eþel, ‘homeland’. Questions of land ownership are foregrounded at all three of the sites where Beowulf battles against monsters: Hrothgar's hall, seized by Grendel; the mere where Grendel's mother dwells; the burial mound filled with treasure which the dragon guards. Licitly distributed both through inheritance and gift, land is not simply personal property but an expanse possessed ‘by a people more generally … a terrain of struggle’ (p. 126). It outlasts those who attempt to appropriate it for themselves or their collectives. Land stands outside human time. Following Howe again, Elden points out that only Grendel and the dragon rule (rician) their domains. Men like Hrothgar and Beowulf guard and ward realms, as in the description of Beowulf as eþelweard. Territory, Elden argues, does not make sense in the poem because land is mostly ‘an indicator of a set of relations that mix economic and political concerns … with the inter-relation of the people with the land they inhabit a key theme’ (p. 128). Yet the story is complicated: Elden also discerns glimmerings of a less economic, more territorial conception of land as a ‘political-strategic issue’ e evident for example in the machinations to keep inheritance in place while constant domestic and foreign threats erupt. Medievalists will quibble with Elden's use of Beowulf to gain insight into seventh-century realities, given the late date of its single manuscript and the unresolved debate over when its narrative was composed. Literature makes for an imperfect historical record e and little of what unfolds in the text is likely to have happened. Still, a concern with land and communal identity is, as the numerous medievalists Elden cites in his bibliography have argued, essential to the plot. It is difficult not to wonder, though, how Elden's meditation on territory's absence from the poem might have changed if he had

considered, say, the Tribal Hidage or Felix's Life of Saint Guthlac, both of which are obsessed with partitioning, incorporating, memorializing. Or perhaps if he, like the Beowulf-poet, had considered the world from the point of view of Grendel, whose land has been usurped and whose reign at the hall might figure other kinds of displacements. The postcolonial elegizing replete in Old English poems, including Beowulf, does not figure in The Birth of Territory, which is not about how territory might have been dreamt by those who lost it to conquering powers. The dragon episode is also quite complicated, since its subterranean space is rich in stories of people whose memory has mainly receded from a land they once held. An economic-political narrative refuses to adhere to the wealth excavated from the dragon's mound, a hoard described at the story's end as remaining as useless as it has always been. Like the careful consideration of King Lear later, the analysis of Beowulf is notable within the greater project of the book. True territoriality requires for Elden robust political theorization, a quiet specificity of genre that militates against extensive engagement with narrative. Yet, as Elden shows, thinkers in late antiquity and throughout the Middle Ages ruminated over place, cartography and power in multiple forums that furnished building blocks for a modern notion of territory. Most of these forums were Christian. Beowulf is described as conveying a ‘clash between emergent Christianity and pagan beliefs’ (p. 123), but after this poem the Middle Ages Elden describes is a landscape populated mainly by theologians looking towards Rome. How different would his story be, though, if he contemplated Beowulf not as a poem full of evidence for the war between antagonistic value systems, but as a deeply Christian narrative that looks nostalgically back to a more uncertain past? What if Christianity were pluralized? What if the Middle Ages were as full of secular vectors as religious piety? What if a relentlessly worldly history had been plumbed, such as Geoffrey of Monmouth's masterful History of the Kings of Britain, the meditation on land, power, sovereignty and identity that launched Arthur into myth? Chivalric romance has as much to say about territory as John of Salisbury, even if it theorizes the political through action and performance rather than abstraction. Yet books, like territories, must have limits to be coherent e and to find their way into print. The Birth of Territory admirably resists the facile rupture narratives that propel too many other histories of ideas, so it is not surprising that its interests might have been directed to multiple archives across the time periods upon which its inquiry focuses. Elden opens The Birth of Territory with Jean-Jacques Rousseau imagining the moment when a man first fenced land, called it his own, and convinced others to believe him, thereby instigating the crimes, wars and horrors that compose human history (p. 1). Rousseau in Elden's smart reading knows that humans did not have to believe the division of land yields property and law, but he also realizes there is no going back. Chaucer was there before Rousseau, describing in his poem ‘The Former Age’ how humans ruined themselves by wounding the earth through ploughing and mining, invented private property, convinced themselves that gold and gems hold value and amount to capital. This myth of a fall from a Golden Age is taken from Boethius (who features prominently in Elden's book as a conservator of classical philosophy), but the idea goes back at least to Hesiod. Rousseau also recognizes that this origin myth is a lie, that the concepts he details took eons to come into being (‘a complicated set of relations that would stretch back in time,’ p. 2). Elden writes that ‘similar questions can be asked about a very particular understanding of property and political power over land, that of the relation between the state and territory’ (p. 2). In closing I would simply like to point out that this method that ties Elden so well to Rousseau (1712e1778) also connects both of them to Chaucer (c. 1343e1400), a medieval secular writer who also knew well that tales of origin tend to be if not lies, then at

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least fraught allegories, and that ‘a complicated set of relations that would stretch back in time’ haunt any contemplation of human history, especially where land, law, techne and labour are concerned e whether theological or secular, whether as political theory or politics in literary performance. The Birth of Territory is an indispensable book. As a researcher who works in both contemporary ecocriticism and medieval studies, I am deeply appreciative of scholarship that digs so deeply into the past in order to prevent facile theorization (or, worse, glib praise) of modernity's achievements. Elden's work is complicated, ambitious, and capacious. By bringing some of his insights to medieval particulars my objective is not to demonstrate limits, but to emphasize the number of portals into approaching the past differently Elden opens. In a time of super-specialized publications and temporally miniscule projects, we need the kinds of vast, energetic and erudite conversations across disciplines that The Birth of Territory both embodies and engenders. Making territory work analytically beyond its connection to the state Saskia Sassen, Columbia University Stuart Elden has given us one of the most thorough and theorized examinations of the term ‘territory’. This is because ‘it is generally assumed that territory is self-evident in meaning, and that its particular manifestations e territorial disputes, the territory of specific countries, etc. e can be studied without theoretical reflection on territory itself’ (p. 3). I fully agree with this observation, and in earlier work I have examined territory as a kind of capability with embedded logics of power and logics for claim-making. Elden traces the genealogy of the term through the rise of technologies for mapping, ordering, measuring and demarcating land and terrain. In his analysis territory is thus construed as ‘the way used to describe a particular and historically limited set of practices and ideas about the relation between place and power’ (p. 7). Even as he criticizes Foucault's historical understanding of territory, Elden uses some of his techniques of analysis to continue his theorization of territory within political geography. Elden argues for seeing territory as a specific historical construction that does not equate simply with either land or terrain: ‘Territory comprises techniques for measuring land and controlling terrain. Measure and control e the technical and the legal e need to be thought alongside land and terrain’ (p. 323). In short, Elden posits that territory would be incomprehensible outside of its relation to the state and to statecraft. He is masterful at showing this: the Birth of Territory is an extraordinary study of this interaction and necessary mutual shaping of the state and territory. Yet it is also here where I find my own research and theorizing takes a different turn. In some ways, Elden opens up to a broader meaning of territory when he examines periods preceding the formation of the modern nation-state. But he concludes that there was no such category as territory in that earlier time; and this is also where he takes issue with Foucault. I am interested in discovering what I can see (as in theoria) if I free up the term territory from its modern collapse into one singularly dominant meaning: national (mostly sovereign) territory. It is, clearly, one if not the most accomplished instantiation of territory. But if we give a more abstract definition of territory, we can make it work as a window into a more complex and diversified range of conditions. Very briefly, I define territory as a complex capability with embedded logics of power (which in our Western modernity found its most accomplished form in the modern state) and embedded logics of claimmaking (which, again, in our Western modernity found its most accomplished form in today's understanding of citizenship). This

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more abstract definition allows us to use territory to gain insights into how domains as diverse as today's high-finance and the occupy movements gain traction that goes well beyond their operational capacity: this traction arises from the fact that they make territory. At this stage this is an inquiry, a research project for me.5 Recent efforts to theorize territory in political science, legal scholarship, and political geography have generally moved along Elden's line of analysis. They equate it to the bounded spaces of national territorial sovereignty. Even where territory is allowed to escape this specific encasement, it has been construed as simply a matter of the stretching or contracting of the boundaries demarcating spaces of territorial power or the deregulation of national borders.6 Though still rare, we now have a developing scholarship that constructs a more ambiguous relation between territory and the state. I see elements of the more expansive understanding of territory that I am after in some of the work by geographers and by legal scholars.7 Thus, John Agnew, for instance, even though focused more on territoriality than territory, argues that current changes in the spatial ordering of political and economic processes signal that aspects of national sovereignty have become non-territorial in nature. That is, to the extent that ‘networks and other noncontingent spatial orderings’ are becoming more evident, territories e seen as bounded ‘blocks of space’ e are losing their exclusive claim on state sovereign power.8 From my angle, which starts with the territorial, there is an ironic turn in Agnew's analysis: a diminishing of national territory which opens up a door (even though it is not Agnew's door) to other instantiations of the territorial. Thus when Agnew uses the phrase ‘territorial trap’ to describe analyses that fail to account for national processes that extend beyond the set boundaries of nation-states, I run with this image in another direction: the territorial trap is the confinement of territory to national territory.9 In a sort of parallel move, even though along a different vector, I also seek to detect the limits of the state/territory connection. But my question is different: ‘What don't I see when I limit the concept of territory to state territory?’ My concern is not so much with sovereignty and territoriality but with discovering the multiple articulations of territory: territory as a variable ranging from the state-linked concept to the digital territories of global finance, and the vast stretches of dead land that have become the terrae nullius of our current epoch.10 Early on in his work Peter Taylor allowed for a notion of territory that can be organized around a vector that is not the state, notably wealth, thereby freeing up the category territory from an exclusive national encasement.11 This was later developed through his work on cities and networks.12 We see this when he defines territory as bounded space and territoriality as behaviour associated with its use, and that the meanings of such use can change in the current global era. In that earlier work he stuck closely to the state. Yet writing in 1994 he opened up new

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S. Sassen, Ungoverned Territory, Cambridge, MA, forthcoming 2016. S.D. Krasner, Power, the State, and Sovereignty: Essays on International Relations, London, 2009; H.L. Buxbaum, Territory, territoriality, and the resolution of jurisdictional conflict, American Journal of Comparative Law 57 (2009) 631e675. 7 S. Sassen, When territory deborders territoriality, Territory, Politics, Governance 1 (2013) 21e45. 8 J. Agnew, Sovereignty regimes: territoriality and state authority in contemporary world politics, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 95 (2005) 441. 9 J. Agnew, The territorial trap: the geographical assumptions of International Relations theory, Review of International Political Economy 1 (1994) 53e80. 10 S. Sassen, Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages, Princeton, NJ, 2006. 11 P.J. Taylor, Territorial absolutism and its evasions, Geography Research Forum 16 (1996) 1e12. 12 P.J. Taylor, World cities and territorial states under conditions of contemporary globalization, Political Geography 19 (2000) 5e32. 6

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possibilities by drawing a distinction between territoriality and the state: ‘Territoriality is a form of behaviour that uses a bounded space, a territory, as the instrument for securing a particular outcome. By controlling access to a territory through boundary restrictions, the content of a territory can be manipulated and its character designed’.13 This possible interpretation becomes clearer when Taylor concludes that we are seeing ‘the continuing use of territory but at different scales: the state as power container tends to preserve existing boundaries; the state as wealth container tends towards larger territories; and the state as cultural container tends towards smaller territories’.14 Even though staying close to the notion of the bounded territory of the state, he posits that to the extent that there are apparent ‘leaks’ in the national ‘container’, these can be explained through a widening or contracting of the borders of territory-as-boundedspace depending on the diverse realms of social activity. By breaking the parallel of territory and statecraft, and capturing misalignments, it is a type of conceptualizing that opens a little door in the direction of what I am after. In my interest to detect such openings I may be projecting an emergent type of analysis on authors who are not at all interested in this question. But there are some more examples beyond Agnew and Taylor. For instance, Anssi Paasi writes that territories are not necessarily state spaces, but ‘states play a major role in “territorymaking” and in the naturalization of links between territories and people’.15 By territory-making, he refers to the institutionalization of regions; any particular territories ‘should be understood as historically and socially produced entities which exist for a certain period and may disappear in the processes of regional transformation’.16 A second kind of disentangling of the two categories, territory and territoriality, is evident in today's specialized differences between countries in terms of the instruments used to specify or construct territoriality.17 Of particular interest is the fact that there are different ways in which state law captures the relation between territory and territoriality among countries that belong to the same geopolitical context. For instance, Hannah Buxbaum examines the different instruments used by the USA and Germany to constitute their territoriality.18 Both countries are liberal democracies that centre statehood in this type of jurisdiction. Further, over time both have elaborated the technical aspects of territoriality and in many ways arrived at similar modifications. Yet, and this is what matters to my argument, each uses very different legal instruments from the repertory of liberal democracies in constructing the relationship between territory and territoriality. To simplify, the US uses largely private law, and avoids international law when it can, whereas Germany uses largely public and international law.19 In my own work I have sought to escape this analytic flattening of territory into one historical instantiation, national territory, by

13 P.J. Taylor, The state as container: territoriality in the modern world-system, in: N. Brenner, B. Jessop, M. Jones and G. MacLeod (Eds), State/Space: A Reader, Oxford, 2003, 151. 14 Taylor, The state as container, 160. 15 A. Paasi, Geographical perspectives on Finnish national identity, GeoJournal 43 (1997) 41. 16 Paasi, Geographical perspectives on Finnish national identity, 42. 17 P. Zumbansen, Defining the space of transnational law: legal theory, global governance, and legal pluralism, Transnational Law and Contemporary Problems 21 (2012) 305; Sassen, When territory deborders territoriality. 19 Buxbaum writes that while the US approach ‘relies heavily on private international law concepts in defining the scope of prescriptive jurisdiction, German courts and commentators view the problem through two very different lenses e public international law and international enforcement law. As a result, claims of territoriality and extraterritoriality resonate differently in the two systems.’ Buxbaum, territory, territoriality, and the resolution of jurisdictional conflict, 636.

conceptualizing territory as a capability with embedded logics of power and of claim-making. As capability, territory can be part of diverse complex organizational assemblages. For instance, territory was less significant in Medieval Europe than was authority, but it gained importance with the emergence of the modern national state, and reached formal fullness in the twentieth century.20 Yet, as capability, territory can instantiate through a broad range of formats, including counterintuitive cases such as nomadic societies and complex systems that mix land sites and digital spaces, such as global finance. Building partly on this earlier work, I continue this interrogation of the category territory by focussing on its misalignments with the state's sovereign authority, and, further, the making of types of territory with few resemblances to national territory. The substantive rationality guiding this inquiry is that a focus on processes that cut across national borders do not only tell us about the weakening of sovereign authority over its territory, but also can show that territory takes on more formats than that of the national. Concluding, my divergence from Elden's analysis does not take away anything from his scholarship and contributions to the relation between territory and statecraft e I repeat, it is one of the best treatments of the subject. It is simply that I want to make the category territory work analytically beyond this connection with the state. Author's response Stuart Elden, University of Warwick I am grateful to Stephen, Michael, Briony, Jeffrey and Saskia for their thoughtful, extremely generous and interdisciplinary engagements with the work. Without categorizing any of them in a narrow sense, the remarks cross from sociology to geography, from history to literature, with the political a continual stake. The Birth of Territory, like any book, and despite its size, is marked by absences as well as presences, by what I did not include e through ignorance, neglect or choice e as much as what I did. As I embarked on the research for the book, I was continually struck by these kinds of issues. I realized that if I had known what I was taking on, I'd probably never have had the courage to begin it; that I had to find some ways of limiting, in geographical, temporal or linguistic scope, what I was doing; and felt somewhat comforted in the thought that the book was an attempt at this question, rather than the final word. I hoped it would open up possibilities, rather than close them down. It was in some senses an old-fashioned study, but informed by contemporary debates as much as by traditional scholarly practices. As such, I'm pleased that some of these things are generously noted, that the ambition of the book is given credit, even as blind spots and absences are gently noted. Let me begin by trying to specify what I meant by trying to examine the relation between place and power. I am too indebted to Foucault to think that ‘power’ is a simple or neutral concept. And after eleven years in a Geography department, together with having read much on the notion, including notably Edward Casey's crucial philosophical history of the concept, I was certainly not trying to suggest that ‘place’ was a straight-forward idea. What I was trying to get at by this formulation was the guiding theme of the book: how do what we today call political issues relate to questions of geography; what is the relation between power and place? Frequently the history of political thought is written with almost no

20 As Jean Gottman notes, in Medieval Europe the concept of patria (fatherland) preceded that of territory, J. Gottmann, The Significance of Territory, Charlottesville, VA, 1973.

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attention to geographical concerns. How might that story be told if a political-geographical question was at its heart? That was my interest and concern behind the book, as much as to trace the political history of a spatial concept. So, ‘power’ and ‘place’ as used here are markers for a set of concepts and practices that need to be examined, rather than concepts in their own right, far less ‘trans-historical’ ones as Stephen Legg suggests. In the ‘power’ part of the inquiry I look at a whole set of issues e things like authority, supremacy, superiority, majesty, sovereignty and, in part, at power in a specific sense, especially as understood as temporal or spiritual. In the ‘place’ aspects of the study I examine how those forms relate to, shape, and are constrained by things such as land, terrain, place in a specific sense, space, and, of course, territory. If I was today to frame the book, I might say it was an attempt to track the relations between people, power and place in diverse contexts, because I do think there is a lot in the book that tracks those complicated interrelations, producing the more modern notion of population. Of course, population has been treated in detail elsewhere, by Foucault among many others, and I was never trying to marginalize that aspect of politics e something that is perhaps too hastily described today as ‘biopolitics’. But if biopolitics is to be a topic of analysis, with all its historical, political, geographical and linguistic complexities; so too is the notion of what we call, again rather too simplistically, ‘geopolitics’. The Birth of Territory was a contribution, I hope, to the latter, but it was in part an attempt to show the interrelation, rather than privilege one over the other. This rebalancing in general was a concern in my first book, Mapping the Present, which sought to spatialize history as much as historicize space; through to a more specific focus in my work on the war on terror; through to this study and planned future work on geopolitics in its plural senses.21 If I did not make my argument clear on these concepts, then it is perhaps not surprising that there are limitations when people look in the book for the relation to their own chosen topic of study. I know that when I was ploughing through the secondary literature I was often looking, instrumentally, for what they could say to my interest. (That said, if a book used ‘territory’ loosely to describe antiquity or the Middle Ages I usually shut it again fairly quickly.) So if I fail to take account of the specificity of meaning of, for example, ‘property’ in this book, as Briony McDonagh notes, I can only sympathise and apologise. I did realize that trying to put every term in historical-contextual situation, sketching genealogies of every word-concept-practice relation would, even if possible, have led to an even more unwieldy book. But there are discussions of property in multiple places in the book. Look, for example, at the comments on land property in ancient Rome; or the disputes between Ockham and the medieval church around possession, use and poverty; or the long discussion of Roman law in chapter 7, which tries to show how territorium was understood in relation to dominium. English common law is not treated as much as it should have been, certainly, and enclosure could definitely have been discussed more, but the English experience is only one aspect of the story, and what I try to say about continental Europe is a crucial element of my account. I tried to show also that the people I was discussing were not just theorists. I may well have failed to take adequate account of common voices, and there is certainly an elite privilege, though I'd defend this in terms of the textual record for much of the period I'm discussing. But it makes no sense to detach the writers I discuss from the contexts in which they were operating. Most of them were employed, supported or protected by major political actors, and some took that role themselves. Ockham was a political actor as

much as a theologian in the period of his work I discuss here; Bartolus and Baldus were working lawyers; Caesar and Cicero key political figures in Rome. In other words, to see them just as political thinkers, proposing ‘theories of territory’ is to misunderstand the relation between practice and theory. The vast majority of those treated in this book were not trying to propose a better way to structure things in some abstract sense, but to make a point with a pen to reinforce an argument about practice e about law, property, taxation, control and deference. It is perhaps only later that we get that curious detachment, but someone as late as Leibniz was certainly actively involved in contemporary politics. To read a modern distinction back into the historical record misses the concrete nature of these texts' interventions. Those figures are, of course, only some of those that might be discussed. I am very grateful that Jeffrey Jerome Cohen has engaged with what I do say about the Middle Ages with such care, and he provides some intriguing indications of what else might be done. For me, the biggest surprise in the writing of the book e and if we are not willing to be surprised, what's the point in writing a book? e came in the medieval work. Right from my initial sketches e and for the Leverhulme Trust fellowship proposal that gave me the time to do the work in the way I wanted to do e I knew I did not want to skip this period, nor treat it with only one or two supposedly emblematic figures. It might have been easy to say that this time was one that let a Graeco-Roman nascent ideal fall into disrepair, only for it to be rediscovered in the Renaissance. But the historical record didn't support such an account. Land was crucially important in the ‘Middle Ages’, so why not territory? Why did supposedly modern thinkers such as Hobbes obsess about the temporal/spiritual distinction? Why did Machiavelli look backwards, not just to Livy, but also to the old model of a ‘mirror for princes’? So I planned to do some work here, and began initial reading on the canonical figures. But as I worked, I discovered all sorts of fascinating traces that I thought needed further investigation, and the material grew and grew, until its current status as about half the book, depending on dating. Beowulf was a fascinating element of that story, and it was here I first discovered Cohen's work. Even as he indicates what else I could have done, I am gratified that he thought it was worth doing. In terms of Saskia Sassen's points about the narrow focus, I have some sympathy with this, but would still insist on the importance of historical-conceptual specificity. Certainly today territory and the state do not exist in a simple relation, or an exclusive one. Territory is used to discuss a range of political-spatial phenomena. While I do worry that if the term is used too generally then it risks losing any conceptual purchase, and I don't think we can redefine it for the past, we certainly cannot understand territory today if we only look at state territory. My previous book, Terror and Territory, tried to contribute to that wider debate; previous work on territory in relation to the European Union and globalisation looked to larger scales; and some of my current work on urban issues broadens it still further.22 I'm also trying to retrace some of my steps and subject ‘land’ and ‘terrain’ to more sustained historical-conceptualmaterial focus. In that I would hope to take better account of their vibrant, dynamic nature than I do in the book under discussion here. But I would still stress that there was an important moment when the concept of territory, which in previous times frequently did not apply to the state, coalesced in a relation between the state, sovereignty and the practice of territory. It is that story which I try to tell in the book. In the period beyond the book, territory exploded in use, becoming at once the taken-for-granted

21 S. Elden, Mapping the Present: Heidegger, Foucault and the Project of Spatial History, London, 2001.

22 S. Elden, Terror and Territory: The Spatial Extent of Sovereignty, Minneapolis, 2009.

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background to political-geographical struggles e nicely described by Michael Heffernan as the ‘banality of territory’ e and expanded in meaning to encompass all manner of arrangements. I have a vague idea that I might continue the story one day, and my interlocutors here, and those that they mention, would be invaluable resources for that work. But I would stress that those seventeenthcentury futures all bear a significant relation to the story I tell in

this book. And it is for that reason, that despite its flaws, I believed it was a tale worth telling. Stephen Legg School of Geography, University of Nottingham, University Park, NG7 2RD, UK E-mail address: [email protected].