Maïa Pal, "Jurisdictional Accumulation: An Early Modern History of Law, Empires, and Capital" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
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Welcome back to the New Books Network Human Rights Channel. I'm Rin Veith, your host. I'm here today with Maya Powell to discuss jurisdictional accumulation and early modern history of law, empires, and capital. Welcome to the show. Thank you. It's really a great privilege to be here today and to speak to you, Leen. Thanks. So, first question, how did you come to this project in the first place?

um so this was my phd dissertation um and i was just trying to count the years and which is quite a scary exercise but um so the book initially as a phd started in 2007 and i think i submitted the final draft yeah end of 2019 so that's 12 years um so it's as a long-term project um

And so I came to it as trying to think first about the relationship between Britain and France as in the history of capitalism.

And I was interested in law. I started studying law as an undergraduate and then went into international relations. So I was really interested in the role of law in the transition to capitalism. And I thought that was going to take me into specific places, looking more specifically at the history of the common law, the history of civil law, and trying to think what that meant, that distinction meant for capitalism. And that evolved...

into actually rather than thinking about the origins of law and the origins of capitalism to thinking more about expansion and the role that law plays in the expansion of capitalism in not just capitalism, imperialism, different forms of empires in the early modern period. So

So it came from my legal background. It came from this interest in international history and international relations and the transition to capitalism and trying to think through these various processes in a novel way. I was steeped in a lot of debates in international relations literature, but also in Marxist literature. And I was trying to find a way

around these and the support I found was in the history of international law, which sort of then helped me focus a little bit more the project as well. So rather than looking at law in general, to try and think more about

What were the institutions, the practices, the actors that shaped the development of international law? So I wanted to basically write a different history of international relations and international law. And that took a while to figure out. Yeah.

And, you know, a lot of existential, I guess, questions and processes. But, yeah, so the project evolved quite a lot from the PhD to the book. Actually, it's a very different book than it was as a PhD. I mean, it's...

it follows and it's in continuation but um but it wasn't a copy paste at all there's a lot more research and different methods different uh actors and case studies involved in the book um and i think it's a life lifetime project uh as well i don't think it's anything i'm done with so um i'm still in many ways working on this same project i feel after so many years so

So I'm a methods nerd. And I really love to hear about how people do research. And also throughout this book, something I really appreciated as well was that you talk a bit about the theory. And anyway, just how this really shaped the project. So I would love to hear about how you went about conducting your research for the book.

what your research process might have looked like. And in particular, you talk a bit about historical sociology and how that shaped your methodologies here. And I was just, I was so excited to read this. So if you could talk a little bit for listeners about how you did this.

Right, thank you. Yeah, so as I said, it started as a PhD project. So for the PhD, it was more of a straightforward comparative analysis, long term comparative analysis from an international relations perspective.

sort of background. So only based on secondary literature and thinking about debates in international relations, particularly. So on the development of the state, of the state system, development of capitalism, the relationship between the development of capitalism and the development of the international state system. So, and more specifically looking at extraterritoriality in countries

the development of those two big things, capitalism on one hand and the international state system on the other, and

somewhere, extraterritoriality fitted in the middle of that or was the link between those two processes. And so the method was to take three cases at that time, which was Spain, France and England, Britain, and compare them in terms of their role for the history of international law.

um so looking at selectional territoriality as a legal mechanism uh initially and how that shaped the institute of international law and through that how that shaped the history of international relations so i was working with a lot of different literatures and debates which was always the tricky aspect um so the method was not straightforward i would say but it was more limited i guess to uh

a historical sociology project. Now, for those who might not know what that is, it's a bit more than a method, but it's an approach, I guess, a tradition that was developed outside international relations. So you could think of Marx, you could think of Weber as sort of

proto-historical sociologists. They didn't call themselves historical sociologists, but what they did is essentially historical sociology. And it's sort of looking at the big patterns, right? The big long-term patterns in history. So mixing, obviously, a bit of history and a bit of sociology. Although, you know, in both those disciplines, they might not recognize themselves at all in that kind of tradition. But it's

So it's taking a more theoretical approach to history, but also a more sociological approach to history as well. So looking at the big questions of what shapes IR, what shapes international relations, why did the state emerge, how did the state emerge?

You know, what are the continuities? What are the ruptures in those big structures of international relations? So, yes, Marx and Weber are sort of two big names. And then it sort of evolves in the

70s and 90s with people who are actually then call themselves historical sociologists. And then in the discipline of IR, you'll have people who will really start working on that. And you'll have a bit of debate between people who will be more barbarian and people who will be more Marxist, then a lot more post-colonial approaches as well developing. So I came at it

sort of at this tail end of quite an interesting renaissance and flurry of work in this area. And it's about, as I was saying, looking at the sort of big pattern. So it fitted the project and what I was trying to do. Then the method sort of evolved a lot for the book because I wanted to add a case study, which was the Dutch Republic, the Netherlands, which was a really important case to add.

And I also started doing some archival work. So the project is still a kind of case study approach, a comparative case study approach. But I then also did some archival work to sort of test the theoretical argument I was developing from the case studies. So it's a bit of a thing, a list of three methods of case studies and then the theoretical, conceptual arguments.

argument developed out of that case study out of the more historicist approach and then some archival work to test that um and to go and have some fun in the archives basically which was such an amazing part of the project um and that opened up a lot of questions and problems obviously um and i hope to go back into some of those archives actually uh for a new project but um

So yeah, it was then I developed something, a specific method in the book called Outward Internalism. But yeah, that's maybe a bit niche to the book itself and to specific debates in Marxism and IR. But it was just really interesting to play more with method. And you mentioned being a methods nerd. And I don't know if I qualify as that, but I've definitely been thinking a lot about

methods um and trying to do more of that because i think in in international relations and marxism as well we tend to just shy away from it or just say that no that's not for us it's just positive to be methodology or you know people interested in um uh primary data collection and i just think that's so wrong and we need to think more about methods even if we're not doing primary research so yeah i really like the methods question and i'm happy to come back on to that

To really jump into the book, jurisdictional accumulation is this really compelling term that you coin in this project. And I think in particular, that term, I think, would be something of great interest to those interested in law and political economy, LPE, which is, I think, gaining increasing interest

There are a lot more people who are working in and around that field now. And so how do you understand this idea of jurisdictional accumulation, particularly within historical sociology and also Marxist thought? Thank you. So as I started saying, I think in the previous responses, I looked at case studies of three and then four empires,

The French or Spanish, or more specifically, I call the Castilian, because technically it was a Castilian Empire, not Spanish then. So, you know, we're staying in the early modern period here. So, you know, 1500s, 1400s, 1800s.

um so the castilian and the french and i'm sort of going by chronological order in terms of their importance so castilian french uh english and british uh and then the dutch um and the idea was to look at those four cases and what were the legal practices and specifically the jurisdictional practices that they engaged in to assert themselves um

internationally, we could say, or globally, or how did they extend or transport or transplant their sovereignty or their power, right? So jurisdictional accumulation is about assessing a different form of power, I guess, used by these different empires. So it's a way of sort of a device, you know, an abstraction to try and see a similarity between all those empires.

but also understand their differences in a new way. So I was really trying to grapple with avoiding the grand total narrative about the early modern period. So looking much more at the complexity, the specificity of these cases. That was the main, I guess, objective here. So that's why the project is sort of a radical historicist project, most fundamentally.

But I was also trying to say something unique about how these empires could be characterized in this period and about how the early modern period needs to be understood in and of itself, you know, for itself, rather than as just a precursor to the modern period that comes later.

So it was trying to strike that balance. The concept was trying to strike that balance between something that they all shared and also a way of separating those cases. So it was about also trying to grapple with jurisdiction as quite a specific process, different to law, different to the juridical or the legal. And there's a lot of literature and kind of critical legal studies on this concept and trying to bring that in

to an IR audience to you know to a different audience um so that I think might be quite interesting for the LPE I guess crowd in terms of you know which has developed since so I've sort of need to catch that train a little bit if I was you know developing a little bit in parallel so uh but it's been fantastic to see the work develop there um but

But so, yeah, trying to bring jurisdiction into the literature and political science and international relations and Marxism as well, trying to say, look, what is jurisdiction? How is it different to law? You know, what does it tell us different that's different about this history? And then also engage with capital accumulation. Right.

and all the debates around primitive accumulation and all the different forms of accumulation that we can maybe see now. And what does that concept do for us, I guess, historically and theoretically? So as I was saying, I was trying to assess a sort of different form of power. And specifically what I was trying to look at is the way certain actors achieve certain rights, certain statuses, certain functions,

and how they specifically seek those rights, statuses, functions. And through those functions, they achieve wealth, they achieve revenue or advantages.

So it's not an economic gain directly. It's an indirectly economic gain, but it's primarily a jurisdictional gain. It's about gaining power, gaining access to then revenue. And that for me was really significant and how I think all these empires are important to understand differently to each

you know, just capitalism, right? Because it's about saying that all those empires weren't necessarily capitalist. Actually, I argue only the English were at that point capitalist. So that's, you know, moving into other debates we'll come back to later. But so the idea is to show that a lot of these actors and these iron empires really relied significantly on these actors to have this sort of jurisdictional power, which wasn't quite economic power, wasn't quite political, it was something else.

And that led obviously to economic and political advantages. But there was something specifically different to how they got there, if that makes sense.

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Thank you. Thank you so much for that. I guess moving to sort of from the broader theoretical to more the people involved in this, something that I found really, really wonderful about this book, I am in and around social legal studies. I have some training in anthropology. So I'm interested in sort of how these things happen through people, not sort of just the broad strokes, is that you're thinking through

and economics and legal authority and jurisdiction through a variety of facets. And it's something that I think that many in the field of international relations and related sort of might not necessarily do readily, that things are sort of sometimes painted in broader strokes. And so to ask the

the more specific question of you know what actors do you see as involved with this process this this idea of jurisdictional accumulation thank you yeah and I think that follows nicely from trying to you know flesh out a little bit what I mean by jurisdictional accumulation and I think I mentioned it very briefly earlier on but I sort of developed this typology of three types of

So, there's the extensions, which I don't focus too much on, but mostly I focus on the other two, which is transports and transplants of authority. So, to recap, jurisdictional accumulation is the process whereby certain actors,

um extend transport or transplant authority and gain a right to extend transport and transport transplant that authority for a sovereign usually but not necessarily it's also for themselves so there's about gaining individual uh

power advantage but also doing that for an empire or sovereign or prince city you know at that point in the early modern period it's still very very mixed in terms of various political authorities so

So, specific actors that are extending the sovereignty or the authority of themselves, but also of other actors. I then make some specific arguments about which empires are more doing transports and which empires are doing more transplants, and that leads into bigger debates. But I guess

to get them back more to the flesh of who these people are. And a lot of, you know, the focus of the project was to focus on agency and on these actors. I didn't want to write something, although it's, I mean, to historians, it probably sounds like that's not what I'm doing at all because it's sort of this grand theoretical project. But in that, I was trying to focus more on agency rather than structure. Yeah.

So the actors, the agency I was trying to bring out was what we could call a more representative types of actors, some sub-sovereign actors, actors that are trying to gain status in the various societies they work in.

lived in. So what we also call today in the scholar of literature on this now developing intermediary actors and actors who are more kind of in the everyday or more invisible aspects of politics or economics who are more kind of mechanic or functional to the everyday processes of of

of the political economy, I guess. And so in that, I was looking more at lawyers, but also merchants, diplomats, certain types of diplomats, governors, or people, you know, who worked in companies, trading companies, which a lot of research has been recently on, obviously, trading companies like the East India Company, or various East India companies, and

And, you know, speaking from where you are, all the companies, the French and British companies who went to North America and etc. So I was focusing more actually on these actors working in the Mediterranean and across the Atlantic. So I had to limit a little bit, at least the scope of the projects I didn't look at.

you know, the East Asia or East Southeast Asia, which, you know, there's a lot of this happening as well. So, you know, maybe one day I'll get some to look at that area. But I was focusing much more on the Mediterranean. I think a lot of research has been on the North Atlantic or South Atlantic as well, but less on the Mediterranean, at least recently, you know, in terms of all the new debates are happening about, you know,

um um cross-atlantic um imperial processes there's been a lot less i think on the mediterranean so it was about talking a bit more about the mediterranean and um and in that mediterranean what really came across is the role of consuls so consuls are specific types of diplomats um

And although actually they won't recognise as diplomats for in some cases. So that was a debate in itself to look into. But I just got completely fascinated by consoles. And this was not in the PhD at all. So it was completely new to the book. And I just went down many rabbit holes while writing the book about these consoles and just realised that

There's a lot of, well, there's some really good literature and a lot of people working on consuls in French and Spanish and Italian as more on the continent, on the European continent, but not much in English. And actually, surprisingly, very few studies in consuls.

So that's, you know, something that I think still needs to be done. So I guess the book was a sort of exploratory foray into who are these people? What did they do? How important were they in all these big transformations and, you know, these big things happening at the time?

um and I hope you provided some answers to that um so so yeah that those are the key actors that um that I really spent time with in the book thank you so much I think you absolutely did uh throughout the the book as well I will say um

So something else I was really struck by in reading this really wonderful, really important book is how extraterritoriality was developed, engaged with and revisited throughout the book. It's really, to me, you know, it's a huge theme. It's a huge aspect of it. Right. And in particular, I really, really appreciated how you describe different forms of extraterritoriality.

As well as offering some ways to rethink and unsettle how we might think of extraterritoriality as something that is sort of only has this one universal form to do the sort of anthropology thing. You help make this very familiar concept strange. And so I'm wondering if you can speak a little bit to how you understand extraterritoriality as having these different forms. I know you've talked about it a little bit so far in our conversation, sort of hinted at it.

um and also you know what are the implications of extraterritoriality on your project of naming and exploring jurisdictional accumulation yeah thank you um i mean the tricky one of the tricky aspects of this book is that there's so many different angles you can sort of get you know enter into it so i really appreciate your work in in uh taking us through it in a way that makes sense so extraterritoriality kind of comes in here nicely um

Before I got fascinated by consoles, I got fascinated by extraterritoriality. So that was the initial entry point during the PhD of science.

trying to understand you know one i had this interest in thinking about international law and international relations how those two sort of mingled and basically in the early modern period they're the same thing right there isn't an international law and there are international relations in the modern sense in the early modern period we're working with loads of complex different actors across loads of different networks um

So it's, you know, we don't have a clear-cut international legal subject, right? There's no state, no nation state. There's no unique standard state in the early modern period, really. I mean, a lot of literature still thinks that it emerges during this period, but I'm really of the people that the state is the 19th century, late 19th. So in the early modern period, we have, you know, a really complex array of jurisdictions, basically, right? Rather than

political units or the political units are jurisdictionally fragmented and overlap and connect in different ways um

So, in that context, what does extraterritoriality mean? Because if we take the view that the states, the territorial unit par excellence, right, is a 19th century construct and really only dominates actually late in the 20th century, you know, post the colonization, post the empires of the 20th century, what do we, is extraterritoriality a term that we should use at all pre, you know, pre this period? And,

And, you know, the literature is sort of a bit confused about this. It's an extremely slippery term because it is used for actually ancient history. You know, people can trace sort of extraterritoriality

It's going back a long time, and then especially sort of with the capitulations in the late medieval or early modern period. So people do have this sort of universal, transhistorical, maybe, to be more exact, view of actual territoriality. But that was one of my big dilemmas. I was like, what do I do with this term? You know, it's clearly anachronistic, but using it for the early modern period. But, you know, but there's something going on here. There's something interesting about what this thing is, or what unites this...

this practice. And so it was about breaking down that term, sort of trying to think of it differently. And the solution for me was jurisdictional accumulation. So jurisdictional accumulation is sort of the better way for me to define or understand, uh, extraterritoriality in the early modern period. Um, but so I still wanted to stick a bit with that term. So I thought it was useful. There was a lot of interest in it in late nineties, early two thousands, because it's becoming now a key, uh,

what it became, it's not that recent, you know, a key aspect of global governance and of US hegemony or US empire, you know, the way in which the US asserts itself today is through applying its laws as well, forcing other states to, you know, abid and comply to its legal system. So, you know, it's a key practice today, but the idea was to think, well, what's the history of this practice? And,

And as you say, to give it different forms. So when I went back to then the early modern for this, I wanted to try and understand, well, A, to break down this idea that there is, that there was a state or a territorial unit. And so extraterritoriality meant something different then.

But I also wanted to say that it wasn't just an exception back then. It was actually a very common practice that defined the early modern period much more than now. Now we see it as a necessary exception, something that keeps a system going in many ways. Whereas back then it was sort of the norm more than the exception that sustains the norm.

Um, so it was trying to think more, you know, trying to give jurisdiction more, more weight as a political practice, um, and of a way in which different actors, um, accumulated power or asserted themselves. So, yeah. Wonderful answer. Thank you. Thank you so much. Um, as, um, I mean, I could, I could talk to you for hours about this book, sort of a last question about this book. Um,

We've talked a little bit sort of around the case studies that you offer, and I just want to give you a few minutes to talk through them as you would like. These case studies, you know, they appear throughout the book, but they feel, at least to me in particular, salient in chapter three, where you really work through these big ideas about social property relations. And notably, you highlight differences and similarities and approaches to jurisdictional accumulation between Castilian countries.

Spanish empires, France, England, Britain, and also the Netherlands. And so I'm curious how you were thinking through these cases, particularly around the uses of military trade and diplomacy, because I just I really I really appreciated this sort of

Comparing contrast sounds way too simplistic, but I really, I found it really generative to think through differences and orientations. And that, I think, to me also really unsettled some of my own sort of internalized sort of universalizing assumptions about what this looked like. Thank you. Yeah, I mean, as I was trying, I think, to convey earlier on, it was my main objective was trying to

to start from the granular, the historical specificity of different cases, but also convey a key similarity and to give an idea of the whole. And I guess that's the bingo of Marxism. How do you get to grips with the totality, with the totality

the overall movement of social relations while doing that from a place of attention to detail and to attention to how things are not always going in the direction of the totality.

how things resist and rupture and go in different directions and how things are specific. So it's really trying to grapple with what's specific and what emerges sometimes out of the collection of specificities as something quite common and more forceful. So capitalism merges as a totalizing process, for me quite late, I guess more,

towards the late 19th, early 20th century when it really becomes global. I was trying to, through the different case studies, deal with that specifically and also say something about these big questions about what's capitalism, when did it emerge, how did it expand, what's its connection to the international system, state system.

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So, yeah, I'm not going to go into detail of each of the case studies, I guess. You know, what was interesting, what came out of the research for me was that... So there's a big debate in Marx and Butler transition, right? And...

the tradition I come from, political Marxism, would argue that capitalism emerged in England first and then expanded through complex ways and through kind of refracted ways and not obvious. It's not like just capitalism was then transposed elsewhere. You know, it was actually expanded in contradictory ways in many ways and not always through capitalism. So anyway, it's a really complex story. But

A range of other Marxists and people would argue that actually, no, capitalism emerged globally through commerce, through the expansion of the empires I've been discussing, you know, across the early modern period. So people like Wallerstein, for example, you know, big...

example of that sort of approach and so there's a big debate between people with more commercialization sort of angle about the transition to capitalism and the more political marxist slash social property relations uh angle so obviously my book sort of you know intervenes in that debate and says but tries to sort of nuance it and say yeah okay it started in england you know if we look at the english case we see specifically how that occurs

But when we look at the expansion, when we look at these empires and how they expanded legally or jurisdictionally, things get a little bit more blurry. So we see what characterizes the English or British Empire is transport authority. What does that mean? That means that they used indirect means to expand, to assert themselves.

So that means that they had intermediary actors. So they wrote, they used more companies, they used more, you know, colonial governors, they used more representatives that were given full control over what was happening, whether it was plantation, settlements, trade, etc.,

This is different to, for example, the Castilian Empire, which transplanted. They retained full control, in most cases, of the colonies, the plantations, the settlements, and tried to reproduce, tried to transplant the Spanish model onto Europe.

the colonies, the people they subjugated. So it was a different process of colonization and imperialism. And that's what these different types of jurisdiction and accumulation tries to get at. So that for me was an important sort of finding, if you want to phrase it that way, of the case studies. And the fact that those different methods came from the specificities of those empires at sort of

at home or in the metropole or in their complex patchworks or fragmented constitutions. And yeah, the English case is really particular. That's not to say that

It was more advanced. Actually, the whole, you know, main interesting question is how did such a backward country as England make it, right? And to dominate everybody else because it was the most backward in the 16th, 17th century. That's the key question that political Marxism tries to answer is how did it, you know,

you know basically um uh outwit not outwit but how did it outdo economically spain at france the dutch and we were the key other empires and not the only empires in that period we could have a big conversation about that but you know the key european empires who were competing and that's you know in the specific capitalist process that developed helped it do that um

So, yeah, so I guess the argument was about trying to say something about the jurisdictional legal processes that came into this story. And social property relations are the kind of political Marxist analytical device that sort of helps us see what's specific about these cases and to sort of move away from the commercialization model. So, yeah, so there's a big story there about the relationship between trade and

and more property-related or politically and economically determined processes of production, if you want to go into the weeds of the Marxist debates.

Thank you so, so much for talking with me, for spending all this time talking through this wonderful, wonderful book. And so now I get to ask you the Classic New Books Network closing question, which is what you're working about now. As I know, listeners are always curious what's next for the authors we feature. So just, you know, if you'd

if you'd like, and as much as you're able to. I'd love to hear a little bit about what you're working on now, whether that's linked to jurisdictional accumulation or whether it's a new project altogether. Right. Thank you. And thank you so much for engaging with the book so deeply. It's always such a pleasure. So, yeah, I'm definitely not finished, despite the 12 years. It's still so many ongoing questions. I guess the book...

It was theoretical, but I still feel that it finished with a lot of open questions, theoretically, about this concept and what I wanted to do with it. So for the book, I was very focused on this is what's happening in the early modern period and that's it. But I guess since I've been trying to work out what do I do with this concept today? Is it a concept that has any legs or how do I adapt it to what's going on today? As I mentioned, extraterritoriality is a really key practice in a contemporary period.

And so there's a question there about what kind of jurisdictional process that is. And I think it wouldn't be too much of a stretch for me to argue that a form of jurisdictional accumulation is happening today. I think that's what a lot of people have been arguing in a way about extraterritoriality and how it's been a key mechanism of US imperialism in many different ways, in different sectors.

um so but i you know i'm still well the new big project that i'm trying to develop um is on um infrastructure cables communication cables um and trying to think about how they actually are a continuation of some of the practices and actors i've been looking at their own modern periods so i'm trying to think of from consoles to cables um

And it's actually it's not obvious, but I think it actually really makes sense because these are key means through which empires or whatever we want to call them today. We can have that debate about whether they're empires or not. But key actors, I guess, of the international system are asserting themselves and more invisible, more everyday ways in which we in which these actors are sustaining their means of reproduction.

or the means of reproduction of their elites, or how they are negotiating with various actors to sustain themselves. So cables, why? Well,

Cables are owned by big tech, right? Google, a lot of Chinese firms more and more, but mostly US, and sort of a partnership between US data firms and key Western European states. So, you know, France and England, there's two European hubs for cable landing sites. So I think there's a really interesting continuity there between

you know old empires trying to maintain themselves in a difficult digital economy where they feel that they're losing ground um and so i'm trying to look at the links between well a first importance of these cables as uh in terms of their jurisdictional uh uses for old states and what kind of partnerships negotiating their negotiations they're doing with other actors um

So that's how I'm trying to transpose this stuff in the contemporary setting. So hopefully working there, there'll be things coming out of that. And I'm still working on the early modern period and like cosmologies in the early modern period and jurisdiction. So that's something quite exciting and new as well. I've been trying to figure out cosmologies in some European context, how we can use that concept also for the European context.

And transition, still always the Marxist transition debates, which, you know, it's such an important question. What's the connection between trade and capitalism and how I think we need to separate those processes? So that's the enduring question, I think, that's so important, I guess, for understanding power today, power relations. Thank you so much for your time today, Maya. Thanks to you. That was always a pleasure.

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