Ebook: Reading Texts on Sovereignty: Textual Moments in the History of Political Thought

Reading Texts on Sovereignty charts the development of the concept from the classical period to the present day. Defined in antiquity as an absolute or supreme type of power, sovereignty’s history has been marked ever since by numerous moments of crisis and contestation through which its meaning has been redefined and reconfigured. Using extracts of key texts selected and analysed by leading contributors from the USA, the UK, Australia, Japan, Ireland, Cyprus, Finland and Spain, this volume examines these moments and how different societies have grappled with sovereignty through the ages.
The book explores a diverse range of geographical and cultural contexts within which the issue of sovereignty became critical, including Medieval Islam, 19th-century Latin America and 20th-century Africa and the Caribbean. In addition the book includes chapters that respond to the vital interplay between the development of the theory of sovereignty and such momentous historical events and developments as the birth of the democratic polis in the classical world, the legal and political developments that attended the rise of the Roman and Islamic empires, the bitter struggles over sovereign rights between the ‘temporal’ and ‘spiritual’ authorities of Medieval Europe, the Treaty of Westphalia, the English Civil War, the French and American Revolutions, the October Revolution as well as anticolonial revolutions in two continents.