Beyond the sea: Extraterritorial jurisdiction and English law, c. 1575--1640

'Beyond the Sea: Extraterritorial Jurisdiction and English Law, c. 1575-1640' argues that legal jurisdiction, political authority and national identity were integrally connected in early modeRN England in ways that fundamentally shaped the country's international relations and, eventually, the administration of the British empire. The dissertation focuses on legal arguments about extraterritorial jurisdiction in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in order to cast light on the larger issues of how sovereignty was perceived, discussed and manifested in early modern England. Under English common law, legal jurisdiction and sovereignty were associated specifically with the geography of the realm, both practically and ideologically, and with the notion of Englishness itself, specifically the liberties of English subjects. In the course of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, England's expanding international political and economic interests created powerful incentives to extend the reach of the common law beyond its shores while simultaneously making the formal recognition of extraterritorial legal authority conceptually and politically problematic.;The first half of the dissertation outlines the relations among English legal institutions in general, and regarding litigation involving foreign elements in particular, especially in the context of conflict between the common law courts and the admiralty for control of maritime litigation. It also identifies the broader conceptual issues raised by these connections. These issues can be most clearly understood by juxtaposing a number of constitutional debates that hitherto have been examined primarily in isolation. Accordingly, the second half of the dissertation takes the form of case studies of these more political controversies and argues that they, too, raised fundamental questions about the extent to which the common law, and English law more generally, should be construed in territorial terms. These case studies show that the conflict among English courts for control of maritime litigation was not merely a matter of internal administrative divisions but, rather, shared a conceptual foundation with key constitutional debates over the nature of English law, its relationship to notions of sovereignty, and the extent to which each can be construed in extraterritorial terms. The work as a whole brings the discussion of jurisdictional conflicts, which hitherto has been confined mainly to histories of English law per se, more directly into conversation with trends in political and intellectual history and seeks to refocus the study of early international law on the questions of how and why the English practice and theory of extraterritorial jurisdiction differed from its continental counterparts in the early modern period.