A Search for Sovereignty, first published in 2010, approaches world history by examining the relation of law and geography in European empires between 1400 and 1900. Lauren Benton argues that Europeans imagined imperial space as networks of corridors and enclaves, and that they constructed sovereignty in ways that merged ideas about geography and law. Conflicts over treason, piracy, convict transportation, martial law, and crime created irregular spaces of law, while also attaching legal meanings to familiar geographic categories such as rivers, oceans, islands, and mountains. The resulting legal and spatial anomalies influenced debates about imperial constitutions and international law both in the colonies and at home. This study changes our understanding of empire and its legacies and opens new perspectives on the global history of law.

Advances an interesting perspective in world history, arguing that institutions and culture - and not just the global economy - serve as important elements of international order. Focusing on colonial legal politics and the interrelation of local and indigenous cultural contests and institutional change, the book uses case studies to trace a shift in plural legal orders - from the multicentric law of early empires to the state-centered law of the colonial and postcolonial world. In the early modern world, the special legal status of cultural and religious others itself became an element of continuity across culturally diverse empires. In the nineteenth century, the state's assertion of a singular legal authority responded to repetitive legal conflicts - not simply to the imposition of Western models of governance. Indigenous subjects across time and in all settings were active in making, changing, and interpreting the law - and, by extension, in shaping the international order.

本书试图从帝国之中，尤其是大英帝国在19世纪上半叶重塑帝国宪法并通过其构建世界秩序的无序式努力中探寻国际法的起源。为我们呈现了世界历史中的一个重要时期，当时，维系全球秩序的是帝国法，而非国际法。这段影响深远的历史将改变我们今天对于大英帝国遗产及国际法之含义的理解。