The Birth of Territory has been reviewed in Croatian International Relations Review by Daniel Šaric (open access). Here’s the first paragraph:
Stuart Elden’s new book The Birth of Territory is a magisterial and in parts almost encyclopedic work. The book covers a diverse and broad ground, starting from political theory and international relations through geography and law to theology and history. The book’s basic presupposition is to present a genealogy of the concept of territory as we understand it today. Elden asserts that the concept of territory is taken for granted today. That is the case in political practice as well as in political theory and the social sciences more generally where territory has been under-examined. Thus, the author “seeks to offer an account of the emergence of the concept of territory in Western political thought. It does so primarily through a contextualized reading of the texts of that tradition with one key question: what is the relation between place and power?” (ibid: 10). He answers this question through a mesmerizing account divided in three parts spanning nine chapters and a coda which are supported by more than 2,700 endnotes. The book won the 2013 Association of American Geographers Meridian Book Award for “outstanding scholarly work in Geography”.
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