HST7702 – Empire and Early Modern Political Thought 2024/25

European states raced to establish empires in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that would provide them with resources to assist in their struggles with each other to survive. As those states engaged in this process of expansion, various authors reflected on what it would mean to be the subject of such empires, thereby developing the concept of rights. At the same time, others used the tools of political thought, including concepts of virtue, greatness, interest, and reason of state, to animate the instruments of empire, including joint stock corporations such as the East India Company. These authors articulated modern understandings of the ways in which states project their power as well the rules of the international order.