The Construction of Territory in Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century International Legal Doctrine

In today’s international law, territory is largely considered as a portion of the surface of the Earth, subject to the sovereignty of a state. This view of territory as an unmediated reality that presents itself to our senses masks the complex doctrinal debates on the juridical nature of territory that occurred during the nineteenth and early twentieth century. This article foregrounds the normative assumptions that undergird the three principal doctrines on territory from the nineteenth and early twentieth century and that still continue to shape views on territory in international law. The principal argument in this article is that legal imaginations of sedentariness and unsettledness played an important role in the doctrinal construction of territory by public and international lawyers. The figure of the nomad thereby functioned as an antipode in imagining sedentariness, civilization, international legal subjectivity, and a distribution of territorial rights along public-private law categories.