For five centuries protection has provided a basic currency for organising relations between polities. Protection underpinned sprawling tributary systems, permeated networks of long-distance trade, reinforced claims of royal authority in distant colonies and structured treaties. Empires made routine use of protection as they extended their influence, projecting authority over old and new subjects, forcing weaker parties to pay them for safe conduct and, sometimes, paying for it themselves. The result was a fluid politics that absorbed both the powerful and the weak while giving rise to institutions and jurisdictional arrangements with broad geographic scope and influence. This volume brings together leading scholars to trace the long history of protection across empires in Asia, Africa, Australasia, Europe and the Americas. Employing a global lens, it offers an innovative way of understanding the formation and growth of empires and uncovers new dimensions of the relation of empires to regional and global order.
Investigates the long history of protection from the early modern period onwards, connecting contemporary debates with older patterns
Examines the way ideas and imperial institutions circulated and considers how pervasive practices of protection influenced global ordering
Provides a new lens through which to view empires as fluid, composite polities in part constructed through and sustained by protection arrangements
Introduction
Part I. Protecting Subjects, Projecting Power:
1. Protection and the chanelling of movement on the margins of the Holy Roman Empire Luca Scholz
2. Containing law within the walls: the protection of customary law in Santiago Del Cercado, Peru Karen B. Graubart
Part II. Conquest Reconsidered:
3 Webs of protection and interpolity zones in the Early Modern World Lauren Benton and Adam Clulow
4. Plunder and profit in the name of protection: royal Iberian armadas in the early Atlantic Gabriel De Avilez Rocha
Part III. Protection and Languages of Political Authority:
5. Protection as a political concept in English political thought, 1603-1651 Annabel Brett
6. Limited liabilities: the corporation and the political economy of protection in the British Empire Philip J. Stern
7. From nurturing to protection in nineteenth-century Japan David L. Howell
Part IV. Protection and Colonial Governance:
8. Protection claims: the British, Maori and the islands of New Zealand, 1800-1840 Bain Attwood
9. Protecting the peace on the edges of empire: commissioners of crown lands in New South Wales Lisa Ford
10. British protection, extraterritoriality and protectorates in West Africa, 1807-1880 Inge Van Hulle
Part V. Protection in an Inter-Imperial World:
11. Between imperial subjects and political partners: Bedouin borders and protection in Ottoman Palestine, 1900-1917 Ahmad Amara
12. Protection by proxy: the Hausa-Fulani as agents of British Colonial rule in Northern Nigeria Moses E. Ochono
13. The problem of protectorates in an age of decolonisation: Britain and West Africa, 1955-60 Barnaby Crowcroft.
