10 - The Nature of Rights and the History of Empire

Summary

This chapter is a study in the globalization of the history of British political thought. What do I mean by ‘globalization’ in this context? If the history of British political thought has been deconstructed into something more than the history of English political thought – and the idea of ‘political thought’ itself into more than just explicitly political treatises, speeches or pamphlets – then what happens when we extend this multi-centred approach beyond the edges of the British Isles to the settler-colonial contexts of North America and Australasia, for example? British political discourse, now a complex of discourses as opposed to one, engages with and becomes part of a new bundle of discourses that includes but is not reducible to either English or British political thought.

To illustrate this approach, I shall consider the genesis and afterlife of one strand of the discourse of rights. The language of rights – especially that of ‘subjective rights’ or, as we call them today, individual rights – was one of the most powerful and influential modes of political discourse to emerge in the early-modern period. Historians of rights have pointed out that although the emergence of subjective rights in the seventeenth century is closely associated with attempts at limiting the authority of states, this legacy is somewhat ambiguous. First of all, rights discourse was used to justify submission to authority as much as limits against it, insofar as it entailed the discretion of individuals to submit absolutely.