About

The provided page text does not contain a professional biography or detailed information about Professor Anthony Pagden's research focus, background, or key contributions. Therefore, the JSON output is an empty string for the biography.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Law
• Art
• Philosophy
• Humanities
• History
• Classics
• Political economy
• Genealogy
• Theology
• Environmental ethics
• Aesthetics
• Art history

Selected publications

• Series Editor’s Preface

  2026-03-19

  book-section1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• They Called it Peace. Worlds of Imperial Violence, written by Lauren Benton

  Journal of Early Modern History · 2024-10-17

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Series Editors’ Preface

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2023

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Humanities
  • Political Science
  • Classics

  Extract The famous “debate” between the Dominican, Bartolomé de Las Casas, Bishop of Chiapas, and official, “Defender of the Indians”, and the humanist historian, self-styled theologian, honorary royal chaplain, and translator of Aristotle, Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, held in the Colegio de San Gregorio in Valladolid in 1550-1, has become legendary. It has been described as the “first morality debate about European colonization”—which it most certainly was not. It was seen in the nineteenth century as part of a largely imaginary heroic struggle of the Dominican order against the Castilian crown. “These excellent monks” as Sir Travers Twiss, former Queen’s Advocate General, salaried champion of Leopold II’s occupation of the Congo and one of the founders of the highly influential Institut de droit international, wrote in 1856, had been “impelled to vindicate the right of the oppressed against the authority of the Church, the ambitions of the Crown, the avarice and pride of their countrymen, and the prejudices of their own Order”. They were, he concluded, “the early streaks of dawn the earnest of the coming day”. In the twentieth century the “debate” acquired a hallowed, if largely spectral, place in what the North-American historian Lewis Hanke famously and misleadingly described as the “Spanish Struggle for Justice the New Word”. By 1949, the “debate” itself, all that was claimed to have preceded it, and all that was believed to have emanated from it, had become, as Carl Schmitt observed sourly “transformed into a journalistic myth.”

  PublisherDOI

• Series Editor’s Preface

  2023-06-06

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Extract Ultimately every discussion over the range, authority, and the very identity of international law comes up against the question of sovereignty. Ever since it emerged in the sixteenth century sovereignty has been what the philosopher W. B. Gallie famously described in 1955 as an ‘essentially contested’—or in Priyasha Saksena’s word—‘polysemic’—concept. At the centre of this contestation there has always been the question of the necessary indivisibility of sovereign power. For the writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, who first defined the term—most notably Jean Bodin and Thomas Hobbes—if sovereignty was to achieve what it was primarily intended to achieve, namely an end to civil war and the protection of the state against outsiders, it could only ever be, in Hobbes’ words, ‘immortal … incommunicable and inseparable’. But that supposed the existence of what it was trying to create; namely an homogenous, territorially bounded nation-state. In the relationship between states, however, in the domain of the international, there simply was no ‘Common Power to keep them in awe’. Therefore, as Henry Maine, jurist, historian, pioneer anthropologist, and Law Member of the Viceroy of India’s Council, put it bluntly in 1887, ‘indivisibility of Sovereignty … Does not belong in International Law’. Beyond the limits of the heavily centralized—at least after 1648—European state system, argued Maine, ‘The powers of sovereigns’

  PublisherDOI

• Afterword

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2023-03-16 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  As all the essays in this volume demonstrate, cosmopolitanism can take many forms and has been understood in many different ways. Diogenes’ famous riposte to the citizens of Athens who asked him to what city he belonged – that he belonged to none, that he was a “citizen of the world”, cosmopolites – was intended as a rebuke. To be without a city meant in effect to be no one, possibly even, as Diogenes’ own outrageous behavior seemed to bear out, not to be really human at all. Diogenes was rejecting a view of the world that identified the person with a community.

  PublisherDOI

• Ius et Factum:

  2023-04-28

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• From Empire to Federation

  Ler História · 2023-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Lords of All the World is a comparative analysis of the history of the ideologies that shaped the Atlantic empires of Spain, France and Britain from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. It recounts the evolution of a conception of “empire”, drawn originally from an interpretation of the ancient Roman vision of a single, multi-ethnic political community in which both the citizens of the metropole and the colonists (and in some cases the colonized) shared a common political identity and were bound by a common rule of law. It charts, too, the process by which the understanding of empire as a community initially based on conquest gave way to one based upon development and commerce. From this there emerged a perception of “empire”, as in effect, a form of federation, a transformation which determined the final evolution of the independence movements in both North and South America.

  PublisherDOI

• Enlightenment beyond Earth

  2022-12-15

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This chapter argues that the Enlightenment concept of ‘sympathy’, in particular as found in Adam Smith and David Hume, as the quality necessary for the creation of any kind of sociability, will be of still greater value in any possible future extraterrestrial community, in which all previous systems of laws and conventions will need to be reinvented. Were this to be the case then the future human extraterrestrial existence might become the fulfilment of Immanuel Kant’s vision of a cosmopolitan order of justice. In both cases, beyond Earth as on it, the conceptions and the values developed during the Enlightenment will be invaluable.

  PublisherDOI

• Series Editors’ Preface

  2021-12-23

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Extract The Law of Nations – the ius gentium – had originally been merely the law which the Romans had applied to their – predominantly commercial – relations with non-Romans. It took on a wholly new significance, however, after the 'discovery' of the Americas, which had in effect brought into existence what the German jurist Carl Schmitt in 1951 described as 'the traditional Eurocentric order of international law'. In this book Francesca Iurlaro offers a broad-ranging and powerfully compelling new account of just how this new 'order of international law' transformed what had once been a form of law based upon a voluntary agreement between peoples, into one which was supposed to be binding on all peoples across the globe – and might thus be imposed by one people upon another. She charts the evolving strategies by which a succession of jurists, theologians, and humanists from Francisco de Vitoria in the 16th century until Emer de Vattel in the eighteenth, sought to create a 'new law which was universally applicable to the global community (orbis), regardless of the specific cultural and historical contexts of local political communities'. This tied the Law of Nations to the Law of Nature (the ius naturae) – the Thomist and neo-Thomist elaboration of the claim that there existed in nature itself a single basic form of knowledge for all humankind, which was discoverable through the use of human reason. The Law of Nature, however, was in effect a piece of cognitive machinery capable only of generating a universal order of justice. The jurists who contributed to the creation of Schmitt's 'traditional Eurocentric order of international law' required something more precise – and ultimately enforceable – something capable, in effect, of creating a true positive law. To do this they turned to custom to provide the normative foundation for a universal legal code. In so doing, however, they transformed what was understood to be 'custom' from a collection of exemplary regulations – which inevitably varied greatly from one people to another – into 'an unwritten norm that the jurist could unravel from the diverse manifestations of human history.' Out of this emerged a new genre: the 'Law of Nature and Nations' which dominated the thinking about the relationship between peoples and states from the mid sixteenth until the end of the eighteenth centuries. Custom was now cast, not as the accumulated practices of individual societies but as the collective expression of the consensus of all peoples (consensus omnium gentium). It was, as Francesca Iurlaro explains, interpreted 'as being both temporally situated – an institution whose foundations resided in Roman law, Christian religion [and] European classical antiquity – and universal at the same time.' Although there were recognized to exist customs that were restricted to individual communities, and which were, where possible, accepted as valid by the European colonizing powers, the kind of custom capable of sustaining an inter-national law could only, as Francesca Iurlaro explains, be arrived at through sustained inquiries into a history which was believed to provide secure evidence of universality. 'Authors of the natural law tradition', as she puts it, 'invented customary rules of ius gentium precisely in an open dialogue with the past.' The customs of the ancient – European – world, 'constructed and fictionalized as universal' – came to stand in for those of the orbis terrarum in its entirety. Custom, it was believed was ultimately 'capable of transitioning the naturalness of reason into the historicity of specific political and cultural context.'

  PublisherDOI

• Las bases ideológicas de la disputa sobre el dominium y los derechos naturales de los indios americanos

  Revista Internacional de Pensamiento Político · 2021-02-13

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  El ensayo examina la historia del debate sobre los derechos naturales, lo que en el lenguaje del neo-tomismo se llamaba dominium, de los indios americanos antes de la llegada de los españoles. El autor argumenta que para el dominico Francisco de Vitoria y sus sucesores no había razones para creer que, bajo el derecho natural, los indios no estuvieran en completa y legítima posesión de las tierras que ocupaban antes de la llegada de los europeos, y que la conquista de los americanos era, por consiguiente, ilícita. Se examina el desarrollo del debate desde el siglo XVI hasta el siglo XVIII, y cómo, al fi nal, las únicas bases seguras que se podían aducir no eran la posesión o la soberanía, sino lo que en su lugar Vitoria llamó el derecho de la sociedad natural y de la comunicación. Esto implicaba que la ocupación territorial de una nación por otra era de hecho ilícita y que la única interacción legítima entre los pueblos era la del libre comercio. Al hacer estas reivindicaciones los teólogos españoles del siglo XVI habían en realidad hecho posible una transición necesaria de los últimos argumentos desde la noción de imperium territorial a la de comunidad global basada en el comercio.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Nicholas Canny

  71 shared

• Gilles Paquet

  64 shared

• John H. Elliott

  64 shared

• Stuart B. Schwartz

  Yale University

  64 shared

• Jack P. Greene

  64 shared

• Michael Zuckerman

  64 shared

• Andrew W. Mellon

  64 shared

• J. G. A. Pocock

  7 shared

Education

• B.A.

  University of Oxford

• M.A.

  University of Oxford

• Ph.D.

  University of Oxford