The European Union, we are told, is facing extinction. Most of those who believe that, however, have no understanding of how, and why, it became possible to imagine that the diverse peoples of Europe might be united in a single political community. The Pursuit of Europe tells the story of the evolution of the 'European project', from the end of the Napoleonic Wars, which saw the earliest creation of a 'Concert of Europe', right through to Brexit. The question was how, after centuries of internecine conflict, to create a united Europe while still preserving the political legal and cultural integrity of each individual nation. The need to find an answer to this question became more acute after two world wars had shown that if the nations of Europe were to continue to play a role in the world they could now only do so together. To achieve that, however, they had to be prepared to merge their zealously-guarded sovereign powers into a new form of trans-national constitutionalism. This, the European Union has tried to do. Here, Anthony Pagden argues that it has created not as its enemies have claimed, a 'super-state' but a new post-national order united in a political life based, not upon the old shibboleths of nationalism and patriotism, but upon a common body of values and aspirations. It is this, argues Pagden, that will allow the Union to defeat its political enemies from within, and to overcome the difficulties, from mass migration to the pandemic, which it faces from without. But it will only succeed in doing so if it also continues to evolve as it has over the past two centuries.

Despite the long history of debate and the recent resurgence of interest in empires and imperialism, no one seems very clear as to what exactly an empire is. The Burdens of Empire strives to offer not only a definition but also a working description. This book examines how empires were conceived by those who ruled them and lived under them; it looks at the relations, real or imagined, between the imperial metropolis (when one existed) and its outlying provinces or colonies; and it asks how the laws that governed the various parts and various ethnic groups, of which all empires were made, were conceived and interpreted. Anthony Pagden argues that the evolution of the modern concept of the relationship between states, and in particular the modern conception of international law, cannot be understood apart from the long history of European empire building.

This book addresses the question of what it means, and has meant, to be "European," covering the period from Antiquity to the end of the twentieth century. The essays discuss questions of politics, law, religion, culture, literature, and even affectivity in a broad account of how a distinctive European identity has grown over the centuries and its place in the future evolution of the European Union. In the massive literature of European integration, no other book takes such a long historical perspective, and none other deals directly with the question of identity.

This book addresses the question of what it means, and has meant, to be "European," covering the period from Antiquity to the end of the twentieth century. The essays discuss questions of politics, law, religion, culture, literature, and even affectivity in a broad account of how a distinctive European identity has grown over the centuries and its place in the future evolution of the European Union. In the massive literature of European integration, no other book takes such a long historical perspective, and none other deals directly with the question of identity.

Francisco Vitoria was the earliest and arguably the most important of the Thomist philosophers of the counter-Reformation. His works are of great importance for an understanding of both the rise of modern absolutism, and the debate about the emergent imperialism of the European powers, and are unusually accessible since they survive in the form of summaries of his lecture courses on law and theology. Translated here into English for the first time, these texts comprise the core of Vitoria's thought, and are accompanied by a comprehensive introduction, chronology, and bibliography.

This book gives a new interpretation of the reception of the new world by the old. It is the first in-depth study of the pre-Enlightenment methods by which Europeans attempted to describe and classify the American Indian and his society. Between 1512 and 1724 a simple determinist view of human society was replaced by a more sophisticated relativist approach. Anthony Pagden uses new methods of technical analysis, already developed in philosophy and anthropology, to examine four groups of writers who analysed Indian culture: the sixteenth-century theologian, Francisco de Vitoria, and his followers; the 'champion of the Indians' Bartolome de Las Casas; and the Jesuit historians Jose de Acosta and Joseph Francois Lafitau. Dr Pagden explains the sources for their theories and how these conditioned their observations. He also examines for the first time the key terms in each writer's vocabulary - words such as 'barbarian' and 'civil' - and the assumptions that lay beneath them.

Despite the long history of debate and the recent resurgence of interest in empires and imperialism, no one seems very clear as to what exactly an empire is. The Burdens of Empire strives to offer not only a definition but also a working description. This book examines how empires were conceived by those who ruled them and lived under them; it looks at the relations, real or imagined, between the imperial metropolis (when one existed) and its outlying provinces or colonies; and it asks how the laws that governed the various parts and various ethnic groups, of which all empires were made, were conceived and interpreted. Anthony Pagden argues that the evolution of the modern concept of the relationship between states, and in particular the modern conception of international law, cannot be understood apart from the long history of European empire building.

This volume studies the concept of a political ‘language’, of a discourse composed of shared vocabularies, idioms and rhetorical strategies, which has been widely influential on recent work in the history of political thought. The collection brings together a number of essays by a distinguished group of international scholars, on the four dominant languages in use in Europe between the end of the fourteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century. They are: the language of political Aristotelianism and the natural law; the language of classical republicanism; the language of commerce and the commercial society; and the language of a science of politics. Each author has chosen a single aspect of his or her language, sometimes the work of a single author, in one case the history of a single team, and shown how it determined the shape and development of that language, and the extent to which each language was a response to the challenge of other modes of discourse.

. . . a pioneer reconnaissance of the notion of colonial identity in the post-Columbian world.--B. W. Higman, The Journal of American History It is these creoles, colonials' as opposed to the colonised, ' who form the subjects of Canny and Pagden's intelligent new book. In its compact pages we watch the {colonials} attempting to work out who' and just how new/old' they were during centuries unhaunted by the spectre of nationalism.--Benedict Anderson, London Review of Books The prolonged death throes of Europe's last overseas empires have stimulated a lively historical interest in the roots of decolonialization. The theme is taken up in this elegantly written and admirably edited volume in which Nicholas Canny and Anthony Pagden bring together a team of specialists to examine how, in the major Atlantic empires prior to the independence movements of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, colonies came to see themselves as possessing their own particular characteristics, and the bearing this had on those revolutions. . . . The editors and contributors are to be congratulated on this rich and rewarding book, essential reading for anyone interested in imperial history.--Geoffrey Scammell, The Times Higher Education Supplement

No work is a stronger, more exacting, heartbreaking record of the Spanish atrocities in the genocidal enterprise of colonization in the Americas. This account provides an eyewitness’s history of the process in the territory of Columbus.

Hernan Cortes's Cartas de Relacion, written over a seven-year period to Charles V of Spain, provide an extraordinary narrative account of the conquest of Mexico from the founding of the coastal town of Veracruz until Cortes's journey to Honduras in 1525. Pagden's English translation has been prepared from a close examination of the earliest surviving manuscript and of the first printed editions, and he also provides a new introduction offering a bold and innovative interpretation of the nature of the conquest and Cortes's involvement in it. J. H. Elliot's introductory essay explains Cortes's conflicts with the Crown and with Diego Velazquez, the governor of Cuba. "The definitive edition [of the letters] in any language. . . . The book is a 'must' for all those who are seriously interested in this traumatic clash of civilizations and the consequences, both for good and ill, which ensued."-C. R. Boxer, English Historical Review "One of the most fascinating Machiavellian documents to come out of the Renaissance."-Carlos Fuentes, Guardian "[Pagden] provides us with two important innovations: the first reliable edition of the most important Spanish text . . . and annotations that draw on Pagden's own profound knowledge of Mesoamerican cultures."-Helen Nader, Sixteenth Century Journal

The Enlightenment and Why It Still Matters tells nothing less than the story of how the modern, Western view of the world was born. Cultural and intellectual historian Anthony Pagden explains how, and why, the ideal of a universal, global, and cosmopolitan society became such a central part of the Western imagination in the ferment of the Enlightenment - and how these ideas have done battle with an inward-looking, tradition-oriented view of the world ever since. Cosmopolitanism is an ancient creed; but in its modern form it was a creature of the Enlightenment attempt to create a new 'science of man', based upon a vision of humanity made up of autonomous individuals, free from all the constraints imposed by custom, prejudice, and religion. As Pagden shows, this 'new science' was based not simply on 'cold, calculating reason', as its critics claimed, but on the argument that all humans are linked by what in the Enlightenment were called 'sympathetic' attachments. The conclusion was that despite the many tribes and nations into which humanity was divided there was only one 'human nature', and that the final destiny of the species could only be the creation of one universal, cosmopolitan society. This new 'human science' provided the philosophical grounding of the modern world. It has been the inspiration behind the League of Nations, the United Nations and the European Union. Without it, international law, global justice, and human rights legislation would be unthinkable. As Anthony Pagden argues passionately and persuasively in this book, it is a legacy well worth preserving - and one that might yet come to inherit the earth.

For more than three centuries after Columbus's voyages to America, Europeans pondered how the Old World's encounters with the New World affected European sensibilities and intellectual horizons. In this book Anthony Pagden examines some of the varied ways in which Europeans interpreted these encounters with America. Pagden explores the strategies used by Columbus and the early chroniclers of America to describe a continent and its inhabitants so deeply unfamiliar to Europeans that they seemed hardly to be real. He looks at how, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Europeans reacted in different ways to these descriptions. Some, like the Prussian explorer and naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, declared that scientific understanding before the oceanic voyages had advanced by slow steps and that the encounter with America had invigorated Europeans to make new discoveries in many directions at once. Other Europeans, particularly Enlightenment and Romantic figures, argued fiercely against the whole process of colonization and acculturation in the Americas. French philosophe Denis Diderot, for example, felt that the European experience of America had led to an increased familiarity with all that was potentially strange and unusual-the creation of a global village-and that this had resulted in a steady decline in that sense of wonder that was the principal incentive for all scientific inquiry. The German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder proposed that all cultures must recognize their essential alienness and that the single world culture that colonization and commerce had helped to create must be allowed to revert to its natural condition of plurality. In an exploration of these and other responses, Pagden throws a vivid new light on the intellectual consequences of Europe's encounter with the Americas.