2At that time I was a fellow of King’s College Cambridge, and generally considered to be a member of the so-called “Cambridge School” of intellectual history. In common with the founders of this “School” – John Pocock, John Dunn and Quentin Skinner – I did not believe that such a thing really existed. “Schools” were assumed to be an intellectual phenomenon confined largely to nineteenth and early twentieth-century Germany. This was, however, I now realise, somewhat disingenuous. I had, after all, in 1987 published an edited volume on The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe (Pagden 1987), which included essays by both Skinner, and Pocock, together with Richard Tuck, Istvan Hont and Mark Goldie, all supposed members of the “School”, although it also contained essays by a number of scholars, the liberal philosopher Judith Shklar and the great Renaissance historian, Nicolai Rubinstein among others, who decidedly were not. Certainly, my concern at that time – far stronger than it is today – with language, discourse, and the conviction that to understand any utterance – and perhaps more importantly why it might be significant today – it had first to be situated in the historical context in which it had originated, I owed, above all, to Skinner. And if it was a simple irony that when I moved in 1997 to Johns Hopkins, I did so as John Pocock’s successor, it was not by chance that Pocock was one – and as far as I recall the only – reader of the manuscript of Lords for the press.

3Lords of All the World was also in many respects the product of discussions with Cambridge colleagues. One of those was Richard Tuck, who also kindly gave me access to his own, then as yet unpublished, Carlyle Lectures, that would later appear as The Rights of War and Peace (Tuck 1999), a book that was to have a lasting impact on what has come to be called “international political theory”. Another was Annabel Brett, of whose Ph.D. thesis (subsequently published as Brett 1997) I had been one of the examiners, and who immensely broadened my understanding of the writings of the “School of Salamanca”. David Armitage, who was then writing The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Armitage 2000), introduced me to a wide range of sources in English I would never have discovered by myself. For his part, Istvan Hont lectured me for hours on the subtleties of the discourse on commerce in the eighteenth century that would make up a central component of the book.

4One thing that the “Cambridge School” generally was not, however, was comparativist. Nor were many at Cambridge at the time – other than those I have just mentioned – very much interested in the history, intellectual or otherwise, of empires which were still looked upon as something of largely secondary interest compared to national histories. And most if not all imperial historians (as they were generally called) focused on only one empire. Historians of British North America in particular paid almost no heed to the history of the Spanish or Portuguese South or to the French North – save for what Herbert Bolton had dubbed the “borderlands”. Lords was explicitly an attempt to get beyond this by building on the possibilities offered by a number of very remarkable eighteenth-century histories, which were at the same time both theoretical analyses and, often searing, critiques, of the European overseas empires. These included Edmund and William Burke’s An Account of the European Settlements in America (1757), William Robertson’s History of America (1777), at least as it had been originally planned, and most remarkably Guillaume-Thomas-François Raynal’s Histoire philosophique et politique des deux Indes – although the most significant parts of this were in fact written by Diderot – which appeared in its final version in 1787. All were comparative or, in the language of the day, “conjectural” or “philosophical”. But as I went on to say, “the Histoire was the most ambitious of such projects, but it was also to be the last. Both the theorists of empire, and its historians, have remained curiously indifferent to the possibilities offered by comparison ever since” (Pagden 1995, 3). My ambition, in part at least, was to take up where they had left off.

5My own intellectual trajectory, which had begun in earnest more than a decade earlier with the publication of The Fall of Natural Man (Pagden 1982), had been largely confined to the history of Spain and Spanish-America, and had been almost entirely concerned with the contact between the Spanish and the indigenous peoples of the Americas, and with the intellectual, moral and legal problems to which that had given rise. My subsequent book on the same theme, titled European Encounters with the New World (Pagden 1994), which might have been sub-titled something like “the idea of the discovery of America”, examined a far wider range of European sources. But it also supposed the existence of a common European problem: how to incorporate something so radically “new” as the discovery (and for Europe it truly was a discovery) of America into the existing body of knowledge about the world. It was not, in any recognizable sense, comparative. Like The Fall of Natural Man, Lords of All the World was, at one level at least, similarly concerned with the attempts to explain, understand and legitimate the European occupation of the Americas. It approached this, however, not simply as a Spanish concern, but as one that was common, albeit in different ways and in differing degrees, to all the European imperial, and would-be imperial, powers. It acknowledged, too, that there existed not only a rivalry but also a shared understanding between them.

6From an analysis of the three most significant empires, in terms, at least, of the literature they had generated – the Spanish, the French, and the British – I hoped that a synthesis of some kind might arise, something which might amount to an understanding of the, to use Kant’s celebrated term, “conditions of possibility” that all shared in common. From this, I believed that it might be possible to distinguish a recognizable set of ideological objectives and possibly a common historical trajectory, from the first colonial settlements to the British and Spanish wars of independence (France’s empire in North-America and in India had been swallowed up by Britain at the end of the Seven Years War in 1763). The book was an attempt to demonstrate just how similar, and yet in many respects dissimilar, the ideological objectives of the three imperial powers became over time. It was, too, more ambitiously, an attempt to explain how and why the European overseas expansion of the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries began a process which would eventually make possible the emergence of the conception of the modern global order.

7I wanted to make a point that seems far more obvious and more pressing today than it did now nearly three decades ago: that the histories of the formation of all of the states of Europe that acquired empires, first in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, and then again in the nineteenth, cannot be understood in isolation, that empires more than any other political form, and certainly more than their successor the modern nation-state, have been responsible for the planetary world in which we all now live. It was not, of course, a book that had to confront, as would any such project today, the outpouring of literature on “decolonization”, “coloniality”, “post colonialism”, “epistemic injustice” and the like. I was not then, nor ever have been since, despite mounting pressure from overwhelmingly Western sources, eager to participate in what Albert Camus once called “the secular confession”. Condemnation, however morally satisfying it might be for the condemner, rarely results in explanation. The book duly acknowledged that the European overseas empires had much to answer for, and it recognized the immensely destructive impact in particular, of course, on the indigenous peoples of the Americas, wrought by the invasion of the continent. It is also clearly the case, however, that these empires shaped the world, as their enemies recognised, in myriad ways, and my task, as I saw it, was to explain what I took to be the most significantly lasting of these: namely the transition from conquest to commerce, which ultimately created the conditions for, on the one hand, the evolution of the modern nation-state, and on the other the emergence of the modern federal union.

8Lords of All the World was, however, far more restricted in geographical scope than all of this might suggest. It did not include, except in passing, the Spanish Empire within Europe, or the Holy Roman Empire, of which, of course, Charles V, under whose aegis some of the most significant moments of the “conquest” took place, was Emperor, nor the Russian. Neither did it include the Ottoman, Europe’s great rival from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century. Linda Colley (1996) was certainly right in her conclusion, that “empire cannot be comprehensively understood – as Pagden seeks here to do – in a purely Eurocentric context”. But I argued then, and would argue now, that what the book lost in inclusiveness, it gained in precision. It was restricted still further in being confined to the “Atlantic” empires, or what have sometimes been called the “first” European empires, so as to distinguish them from the empires that followed in the nineteenth century. Ideologically, politically, culturally, economically and, perhaps most important of all, administratively, there is a marked difference between the two. To put it very simply (and perhaps rather too crudely) the first were – or at least claimed to be – attempts to recreate the vision of a unified global order, modelled very loosely on an imaginaire taken from ancient Rome. Hence the title of the book. The Roman Emperor, Antoninus Pius (86-161 CE), assumed the title Dominus totius orbis, a claim which was intended as much as an assertion of legal right as to future omniscience. In their different ways, and although none of them, not even the Spanish, ever made such grandiloquent claims, all the first European ideologues of empires, if not their rulers – Charles V went so far as to tell Pope Paul III in 1536 that he never claimed, nor had any wish to be “Monarch of the world” – did their best to follow in Antoninus’ wake.

9As I remarked in the Introduction to Lords: “Since the first decades of the sixteenth century, the modern world […] had been dominated by a struggle between the three major European powers, Spain, France and Britain, for control of the non-European world. And the main theatre for that struggle had been America”. This all came to an end with the revolutions first in North then in South America, that created the world’s first modern independent post-colonial states, governed, althoughby no means – despite the language spoken by the American Founders – entirely populated by former European settlers. Their existence also gave rise to what the marquis de Condorcet, in the immediate aftermath of the French Revolution, was perhaps the first to describe as “the West”. The second world empires reached far further – into Africa, Asia and the Pacific. But they were predominantly the creation of the modern nation-states that emerged in Europe after the end of the Napoleonic Wars. They had far less interest in settler colonialism, far less perception of the empire as overseas extensions of the metropolis – “Kingdoms of the Indies” as the Spanish possessions in America were significantly called – and were certainly far less prepared to recognise their populations as, for instance, Edmund Burke had the peoples of India, as “our fellow citizens”. And compared to their predecessors, they lasted for all their might, for a relatively short time.

10Even though I had been specific in limiting my investigations in Lords of All the World to these “first” empires, there were even there two striking lacunae. The most glaringly significant was, as the late António Hespanha pointed out to me at the time, of course, Portugal. The other was the Netherlands. At the time of writing, there seemed to me to be two – in retrospect perhaps not very compelling – reasons for these omissions. The empires of both Portugal and the Netherlands were substantially trade-based, a fact that their apologists dwelt on at some length. Both, of course, had settlements in Africa, the Americas and Asia, but with the obvious and marked exception of Brazil – and possibly New Amsterdam – neither had true colonies much before the nineteenth century. Neither, too, had any kind of ideological commitment, however illusory, to universal dominium. It was, Hugo Grotius said of it, simply an idiotic claim – stultum titulum. And in this period – again with the exception of Brazil and New Amsterdam – neither had any significant presence in the Atlantic world with which the book was overwhelmingly concerned. I still believe that in the context of what I had set out to achieve in the book, this limitation was a legitimate one. Lords was never intended to be anything like the broad overarching “survey” Peoples and Empires that I wrote later (Pagden 2001).

11I also recognise, however, that these are not really entirely adequate explanations. One of the points I try to make in the book is that the British Empire, at least in the eyes of some of its leading apologists, similarly began as an “empire of trade” and only slowly found itself becoming instead a true motley collection of settler colonies in the Americas. As the Scotsman Andrew Fletcher Saltoun declared as late as 1698 – by which time Virginia had become a crown colony legally, if not in fact, acquired by conquest – “The sea is the only empire which can naturally belong to us. Conquest is not our interest” (quoted in Pagden 1995, 115). It is also the case that one of the themes of the book is precisely the force of the eighteenth-century claim, that one of the unintended consequences of what John Darwin (2007, 51) nicely called “the occidental break-out” had been the slow transition of the world – or at least of the Western part of it – from one made up of warring communities to one made up of peaceable commercial ones, from societies of warriors to ones of traders. In this, the Portuguese and the Dutch were the true pioneers.

12And this brings me to what was a central point of the book. This was, as have been almost all of my subsequent books, a concern with the identity and role of the European (as well as North and South-American) Enlightenment in the evolution of a modern liberal world. In this way it provided some of the groundwork for two subsequent books, one in Spanish (Pagden 2002), the other in English (Pagden 2013), and my own beginnings of a move away from a rather narrow concentration on Spain and Spanish-America – not that I have ever abandoned these entirely – to a wider concern with the global order and with Europe’s place within it. Lords was not, however, as were both these later books, intended to be an attempt to define the “Enlightenment project”, much less to defend it against its communitarian critics on the one hand, and its post-colonial enemies on the other. But it is unequivocally, a book about “empires”, and – at one level at least – what we can hope to learn and salvage from them. And my overall view at the time was, and still very largely is, neatly summed up in a lecture given in 1994 by Eric Hobsbawm:

The progress of civility which took place from the eighteenth century until the early twentieth was achieved overwhelmingly or entirely under the influence of the Enlightenment, by governments of what are still called, for the benefit of history students, ‘enlightened absolutists’, by revolutionaries and reformers, Liberals, Socialists, and Communists, all of whom belonged to the same intellectual family. It was not achieved by its critics.

13Were I to attempt to write anything like Lords again, I would make this crucial point far more forcefully, far more combatively. I would also certainly extend the range of comparison to the rest of Europe, if not beyond. For all that, the book was generally well received, was translated into Italian, and Spanish and is, apparently, still in print. There were inevitably – given the character of the times – those reviewers who thought that an intellectual history or an history of ideas, concepts, languages of any kind, should as one reviewer put it “descend [...] to the social and economic base”, as if that was obviously where true causality lay. James Muldoon (1997), for his part, rightly took me to task for having given insufficient space to his own pet concern, the canon lawyers. John Headley (1996) in a very perceptive, generous – and long – review article dedicated to the book in the International History Review (something of a pioneer at the time) remarked that “Pagden argues that the anxieties and justifications of these earlier discourses continue today to affect the West’s relationship to the rest of the earth’s peoples”. Which indeed was precisely what I was trying to achieve.

14The English historian Jonathan Clark (1995) – now, like me, an émigré to the United States – described me in the (London) Times as “a Seeley for the 1990s”. I am still not quite sure what he meant to imply. J. R. Seeley, who was Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge in the 1870s, is perhaps best remembered today for having declared (of the British) that “we seem, as it were, to have conquered half the world in a fit of absence of mind”, a view whose implications my book most certainly did not share. Indeed I described it at the time as “patently absurd if not actually meaningless” (Pagden 1995, 9). But there is another aspect of Seeley, which, in retrospect, seems much more pertinent, and to which Clark may have been alluding: he was an ardent federalist who believed that one day all Europeans might, “when called upon to do so […] prefer the Union to the State […] [and] take up a completely new citizenship”, and take as much pride “in calling [themselves] Europeans” as “Englishmen, Frenchmen, Germans” (Seeley 1871). As far as Britain itself is concerned, he has, of course, been proved, alas, to be utterly mistaken. But his vision was, for the rest of the continent, a prophetic one.

16Lords was also written at a moment when, at least as many at the time saw it, the modern nation-state which had been in great part created out of the demise of empires – both Western and Eastern – seemed to be in a state of imminent collapse. Lords of All the World was resolutely a work of history. But as I said in the introduction it was also intended to be, at one level at least, a history, or a pre-history, of the world in which we now live, a world in which “the nation is in prolonged and often violent conflict with the confederation to become the dominant mode of political association of the next century” (Pagden 1995, 1). That century is now twenty three years old, and although, the nationalist conflicts of the past decades have been mild compared to those of the last century, I still believe that if we are to understand where we – and in particular we in Europe – might be headed, we have to envisage a future in which nations will not, as was once thought, simply “wither away” or “fade into the shadows” but will undergo still more radical changes as they distribute an increasing number of their former functions and responsibilities to several kinds of international organizations, some of which, at least, look remarkably like empires in a number of ways (Strange 1996, 82-87). And in time this will lead to the emergence of a wholly transformed mode of empire, of a global federation, or of what I have called a “federation of federations”. As Woodrow Borah (1997) astutely pointed out in his review of Lords in the Hispanic American Historical Review, “Pagden obviously favors this idea [federalism] for world organization today”.

17Last June I published, in Italian, a book in which I try to describe these possibilities (Pagden 2023). In many respects it takes up the theme first to be found in Lords of All the World and carries it into the future, or at least into one possible future. Appropriately the publishers – Il Mulino – were also the publishers of the Italian translation of Lords of All the World.