This book analyses the laws that shaped modern European empires from medieval times to the twentieth century. Its geographical scope is global, including the Americas, Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia and the Poles. Andrew Fitzmaurice focuses upon the use of the law of occupation to justify and critique the appropriation of territory. He examines both discussions of occupation by theologians, philosophers and jurists, as well as its application by colonial publicists and settlers themselves. Beginning with the medieval revival of Roman law, this study reveals the evolution of arguments concerning the right to occupy through the School of Salamanca, the foundation of American colonies, seventeenth-century natural law theories, Enlightenment philosophers, eighteenth-century American colonies and the new American republic, writings of nineteenth-century jurists, debates over the carve up of Africa, twentieth-century discussions of the status of Polar territories, and the period of decolonisation.

'Occupancy, property, and the right and the power to possess are, as Andrew Fitzmaurice says at the beginning of his ambitious and compelling new book, the basis of all human societies and the foundations of all (Western) political thinking.' Anthony Pagden, The Journal of Modern History

Andrew Fitzmaurice is Associate Professor of History at the University of Sydney. He is the author of Humanism and America: An Intellectual History of English Colonisation, 1500-1625 (Cambridge, 2003), and co-editor of Shakespeare and Early Modern Political Thought (Cambridge, 2009).