Elden, S. (2013) The Birth of Territory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Stuart Elden’s The Birth of Territory dismantles the apparent obviousness of territory by refusing to treat it as a timeless container of political life. Beginning from Rousseau’s fenced plot, Elden shows that territorial order cannot be reduced either to land as property or to terrain as strategic ground; rather, it emerges through historically specific assemblages of law, measurement, jurisdiction, cartography, military practice and political theory. The book’s case study is Western political thought from the Greek polis and Roman imperium through medieval papal-secular conflict, Roman law, Renaissance statecraft and the post-Reformation consolidation of territorial rule. Its most decisive synthesis lies in the claim that modern territory is a political technology: not merely a bounded surface, but a calculative and juridical apparatus through which power becomes spatially delimited, administratively knowable and sovereignly exercisable. Bartolus and Baldus, for example, become crucial because they bind territorium to jurisdiction, making space itself the object of rule rather than merely its setting. Elden’s conclusion is therefore methodological as well as historical: to understand the modern state, one must reconstruct the conceptual birth of the spatial form that makes it intelligible. Territory is not the background of politics; it is one of politics’ most consequential inventions.