| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Sovereignty and Possession in the English New World: The Legal Foundations of Empire, 1576–1640. By Ken MacMillan. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. xiv, 235 pp. $90.00, ISBN 978-0-521-87009-2.)

Given the growing interest in the English empire's transatlantic constitution, this exhaustively researched and gracefully written monograph is important historiographically and substantively, and deserves a wide and critical readership. Ken MacMillan argues persuasively that England was forced to employ Roman law rules concerning sovereignty and land acquisition to gain international recognition of English New World settlements. Drawing on book 41 of Justinian's Digest and book 2 of his Institutes, English civilian lawyers insisted that in natural law and the law of nations, sovereignty over non-Christian territories in the New World was not complete until the land was occupied (pp. 58, 108, 120). In the verbiage of letters patent (charters and proprietorial land grants) the Crown asserted its intention to occupy lands granted, and it followed that assertion of imperium by building strong fortifications and issuing printed maps that asserted and reinforced royal claims of authority over, and familiarity with, the New World (pp. 121, 147, 148 et seq.).

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