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DOI: 10.1080/23269995.2015.1106722

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The birth of territory, by Stuart Elden, Chicago,

The University of Chicago Press, 2013, xi + 493 pp.,
$90.00 (hardback), ISBN 9780226202563, xi + 493
pp., $30.00 (paperback), ISBN 9780226202570

Stuart Elden

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University of Chicago Press, 2013, xi + 493 pp., $90.00 (hardback), ISBN 9780226202563,
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 Global Discourse, 2015

BOOK REVIEW SYMPOSIUM ON THE BIRTH OF TERRITORY,

BY STUART ELDEN

The birth of territory, by Stuart Elden, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press,
2013, xi + 493 pp., $90.00 (hardback), ISBN 9780226202563, xi + 493 pp., $30.00
(paperback), ISBN 9780226202570

Response
Downloaded by [University of Warwick] at 00:15 16 November 2015

Stuart Elden

I am naturally delighted and very grateful to have been jointly awarded the Global
Discourse book prize for The Birth of Territory (2013a), and thank Matthew Johnson and
the editorial board of the journal for their decision. I am also grateful to Jordan Branch
(2015) and Jeppe Strandsbjerg (2015) for their generous praise and engagement with the
book.
I have taken part in three previous review symposia on this book, in Political
Geography (Minca et al. 2015), Dialogues in Human Geography (Vol. 4 No. 3) and
the Journal of Historical Geography (Legg et al. 2015). The latter, uniquely among these
discussions, included voices from outside the discipline of Geography, though several
other reviews have engaged with the book in an interdisciplinary way. While the book
was largely written while I was in a Geography department, at Durham University, and
the question of territory, historically and politically, was the core of my teaching there, I
did not only think of the book as a ‘Geographical’ study. It was, I hope, a contribution to
the history of thought, especially the history of political thought, albeit through the lens
of a concept generally understood to be a geographical one. As such, the focus of this
journal makes this an especially nice honor.
Territory is, of course, in its staking out of political control of a portion of the earth’s
surface, a political–geographical notion. And yet while geographers, especially political
geographers, see the concept and practice as sitting at the very core of their discipline,
political scientists and international relations scholars have tended to treat it as an
important background to the questions they study, rather than as worthy of sustained
investigation in its own right. Treaties, border negotiations and disputes, secession, union
and so on may be the topics of important studies, but an overall conceptual analysis
seemed to me to be lacking. This is what I meant in the book when I suggested that there
were studies of and disputes over territories, but not of territory.
In recent years this situation has been partly addressed, and Branch and Strandsbjerg
are themselves authors of important studies that do a lot to contribute to this reassess-
ment (Branch 2013; Strandsbjerg 2010). As the endorser of one book, and a reviewer of
the other (Elden 2015), I am sympathetic to their approaches, and grateful for the way the
present reviews continue the conversation. I am particularly struck by Branch putting the
ideas in the book to work in thinking about territorial conflict today, and Strandsbjerg
using the analysis to develop his work on globalization, which he suggests is not
 2 Book review symposium

examined as much as it might have been here (though see Elden 2005, and hopefully
future work). There is also a developing literature in the political theory of territory, some
of which is mentioned by Branch, though what I have seen of this so far tends to take
territory as another commodity which may be a stake of political struggles or disputes, to
which notions of justice, rights and power may be applied in an analysis. Important
certainly, and this is undoubtedly better than the previous situation, but some of this work
tends to take ‘territory’ itself as largely unproblematic. We might benefit from sustained
analysis of the concept of ‘justice’ but we learn relatively little about ‘territory’ in such
studies of territorial justice (see Elden 2010).
It was partly to try to address that question that I wrote The Birth of Territory. It
was a book with a twofold aim. One was historical-conceptual: how had questions of
power relations – authority, sovereignty, supremacy and so on – related to questions of
space, place, and land, out of which, at some point, what we now call ‘territory’
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emerged. The other was whether that examination might shed light on how we
understood territory today. Although the second receives some treatment in the book
under discussion here, especially in the Foucauldian suggestion we should understand
territory as a ‘political technology’, it was most fully analyzed in my previous book,
Terror and Territory: The Spatial Extent of Sovereignty (2009). I had done quite a lot
of work on territory historically, and even drafted some chapters of The Birth of
Territory, before I put the work aside for a while to write that more contemporary,
more urgent, more obviously political book. It was an attempt to show how the
historical-conceptual work I was doing could shed light on contemporary issues, in
the ‘war on terror’ but also within a wider analysis of the fracturing of the notion of
territorial integrity in the post-Cold War world.
It might be helpful to say a little bit more about what I meant by the notion of
‘political technology’. Rather than this being an absolute definition, which could be set
against other existing definitions, I was trying to suggest a way of questioning how
territory, and other power–place relations, had been understood and practiced at different
times and places. Territory naturally sat in some kind of relation to land, which raised a
host of questions that I perhaps too narrowly circumscribed as political-economic. In
some recent work on Henri Lefebvre’s rural writings, with Adam David Morton
(Lefebvre 2015; Elden and Morton 2015), I’ve been trying to think about land in a
somewhat expanded way. Similarly territory had an important relation to a still-under-
theorized term, that of terrain, which brings in a physical materiality, and raises a number
of issues in military and political-strategic registers. Since the book, in two conference
sessions organized with Gastón Gordillo, I have been part of a conversation between
geographers and anthropologists about how to think about terrain in multiple registers,
both conceptually and materially.
To grasp territory, I felt, it was more important also to look at what was being done to
land and terrain, mechanisms of claiming, control, measuring, mapping, charting and
surveying. This is what motivated me to push beyond just the political-economic or
political-strategic ways of thinking about territory. There were many other things at
stake, but I stressed the political-legal and political-technical. Both are modes of tech-
nology in a broad sense: not the merely and narrowly technological, but modes of
actions, practices, skills and determinations. Many of the same techniques that
Foucault analyses in relation to population seemed to me to be important in terms of
understanding territory. The point was that the political, geographical, economic,
 Global Discourse 3

strategic, legal and technical were registers that needed to interrogated, rather than
elements of a definition in themselves.
In order to examine these questions, I set myself the goal of trying to think about
those registers within of the canon of Western political thought, while at the same time
trying to reach beyond narrowly circumscribed understandings of that tradition. I wanted
to bring unjustly neglected figures into the story, and to emphasize the political aspects of
writers generally known for other work. In perhaps the biggest shift of my own sense of
the tradition, I gave a lot of attention to the medieval period, which eventually became
about half the book. I looked at literary, theological, legal and technical texts as well as
works of political theory, treatises and constitutions. I ended up assessing the period from
early Greek thought to the early eighteenth century, ending the substantial analysis with
Leibniz and bookending the study with some comments on Rousseau. This was an
ambitious and wide-ranging task, but one that ran into many issues of exclusion,
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which I will return to in a moment.

The idea of reading the tradition was to see what these texts, and the practices of
which they were reflections upon, interventions in and demands for, said about the
overarching question of relations between political rule and geographical determination.
This was what I called, as a short-hand, the relation between place and power: not
thinking that either place or power were simple concepts, but to use them as markers to
interrogate the multiplicity of mechanisms of rule and their object or extent. Many of the
mechanisms we today associate with territory can be found in the earliest political
practices and texts. These might include issues such as exclusion, inclusion, claiming,
conquering, regulating, taxing, and bordering. How these were organized, disputed,
assessed and regulated are all be worth examination, and there are discussions of all in
the book. But were these territorial models of ordering, or something else? It did not
seem to be insignificant that other words were used to describe concepts that related in
complicated ways to practices. Even when, very rarely, classical Latin texts used the
word territorium it was not clear that this could be straightforwardly translated as
‘territory’ as we understand it today. So, rather than thinking that earlier political
structures were pale forms of our own, I tried as much as possible to explain them on
their own terms, within their own situations. This is not easy to do, but it seemed to be
worth the attempt. I was and remain continually frustrated by the anachronistic use of
modern political terminology – state, sovereignty and territory – to describe quite
different structures of rule. I attempted to be quite textual in this approach, tracing
each text back to the original language to see the words that were being used; and
contextual, seeking to situate the debates within a wider framework. (Though, as
Strandbjerg notes, still more might have been done in the latter.)
I was hardly alone in this approach, and I learned a great deal from other work in the
history of thought, especially the history of political thought. The work done by people
like Quentin Skinner, J.G.A. Pocock, Reinhart Koselleck and their colleagues was
invaluable, both in terms of content and especially method. But, in general terms, I
didn’t see that this work had been directed towards the question of territory. So,
motivated by their approach and inspired by their successes, that was what I sought to
do. My greatest theoretical debt remains to Foucault, who has been a continual source of
reference and inspiration since I first read him over 20 years ago (see Elden 2001). He
continues to be the focus of my current work (2016a, 2017). But while I found him
invaluable as a shaping the approach I took, I had substantial problems with his specific
claims about territory. Most fully worked through in a separate article (2013b), this
 4 Book review symposium

seemed to me to be the only appropriate way to write a Foucauldian study of territory:

inspired by his example, but unwilling to accept his authority uncritically. Other thinkers
were also invaluable. I don’t think I could have written this book without thinking about
the relation of space and the state, for which Lefebvre was a major inspiration (see Elden
2004; Lefebvre 2009; Brenner and Elden 2009); and the material on calculation and
technology owes much to my earlier work on Martin Heidegger (see Elden 2006). Other
works on different concepts such as Clarence Glacken’s Traces on the Rhodian Shore
(1967) and Edward Casey’s The Fate of Place (1997) were inspirational, and I am
enormously gratified that more than one reviewer has saw fit to compare my work to
Glacken (Hagen 2014; Kearns 2014; Heffernan in Legg et al. 2015).
Like those studies, The Birth of Territory is a long book, just over 200,000 words
including the quite extensive endnotes. But it could have been much longer, either
through more detailed analysis of the texts it does discuss, more historical background
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and clearer linking sections; or through discussion of different material. I have been,
generally kindly, admonished for not saying enough about sovereignty, property, carto-
graphy and so on. Fair enough, and I know when I was working on this study I was
frustrated by books that I thought should have addressed my interest, territory, more
directly. It is not surprising that people might find my book lacking in sufficient detail on
their focus. Alternatively there are challenges to readings of particular thinkers.
Sometimes these have come on the basis that I deny the thinker had a concept of territory
or a fully worked out theorization. It does not seem to be a minor point that key thinkers
never use the word or a cognate term, or describe a practice in a different way, either
assuming it as an unproblematic background (as today) or being motivated by entirely
other concerns. I have little patience for the undergraduate-like reply: ‘well that isn’t
what he said, but it must be what he meant’. I was continually trying to recognize that
thinkers of the past were not grasping, inconclusively and inadequately, for what later
ones achieved or took for granted. They may have been thinking entirely differently. This
relates to a cognate issue in the history of cartography. Were ancient and medieval
mapmakers less technically skilled than their renaissance and modern ancestors, or
were their maps for different goals?
Equally I have been asked what might be said about Chinese, Islamic, Indian or
Japanese notions of territory. I’ve said something in reply to this before, but the general
point I make is that while those would be fascinating studies for me to read, they would
not be ones that I could write. The kind of textual approach I used necessarily put some
limits on languages I could work with. But it also, for me, raised a more important
question. I spend quite a bit of time in the book suggesting that ‘territory’ is not the key
word or concept to make sense of how large periods of Western history structured
political–geographical relations, and that to trace its emergence required attention to
different practices and ways of describing them. So, my question would be whether these
Chinese, Islamic, Indian or Japanese studies would be of something else, of political–
geographical relations, of the intersection between political relations and their object or
extent. Today, perhaps, in a globalized world, and earlier through colonial practices,
these stories would intersect and overlap. But historically, it is not entirely clear that they
would. At least, that should be one of the questions at stake. To think of them as studies
of ‘territory’ would arguably be to force them into a Western framework and see things in
that light, rather than as studies of different traditions. If such studies were to be written,
I would hope the different registers of inquiry I proposed would be helpful, though it is
entirely possible they would need to be supplemented or replaced by others. In my own
 Global Discourse 5

work, I’ve already begun thinking about how territory might be examined more carefully
in relation to physical, material questions, something which was there in the book, but
perhaps underplayed (see Elden 2013c, 2016b).
Friedrich Nietzsche remarked in On the Genealogy of Morality that ‘only something
which has no history can be defined’ (1994, 53). And yet, we can write a history of how
things have come to be defined, of how they were understood, labeled and practiced in
different times and places, and of the political effects this had. The Birth of Territory was
a book that sought to do just that with a very specific focus, within a circumscribed
period of Western thought. As I have said before, part of its point was to provide a map, a
guide for future work, rather than close things off. If the book can be put to use, if the
ways I worked might be helpful to others, then I will be enormously gratified. Both
Branch and Strandsbjerg, along with some earlier reviewers (i.e. Kearns 2014) begin to
show how that might be done.
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References
Branch, J. 2013. The Cartographic State: Maps, Territory and the Origins of Sovereignty.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Branch, J. 2015. “Review. The Birth of Territory, by Stuart Elden.” Global Discourse. doi:10.1080/
23269995.2015.1023041.
Brenner, N., and S. Elden. 2009. “Henri Lefebvre on State, Space, Territory.” International
Political Sociology 3 (4): 353–377. doi:10.1111/ips.2009.3.issue-4.
Casey, E. S. 1997. The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Elden, S. 2001. Mapping the Present: Heidegger, Foucault and the Project of a Spatial History.
London: Continuum.
Elden, S. 2004. Understanding Henri Lefebvre: Theory and the Possible. London: Continuum.
Elden, S. 2005. “Missing the Point: Globalization, Deterritorialization and the Space of the World.”
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 30 (1): 8–19. doi:10.1111/tran.2005.30.
issue-1.
Elden, S. 2006. Speaking Against Number: Heidegger, Language and the Politics of Calculation.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Elden, S. 2009. Terror and Territory: The Spatial Extent of Sovereignty. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Elden, S. 2010. “Thinking Territory Politically.” Political Geography 29: 238–241. doi:10.1016/j.
polgeo.2010.02.013.
Elden, S. 2013a. The Birth of Territory. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Elden, S. 2013b. “How Should We Do the History of Territory?” Territory, Politics, Governance 1
(1): 5–20. doi:10.1080/21622671.2012.733317.
Elden, S. 2013c. “Secure the Volume: Vertical Geopolitics and the Depth of Power.” Political
Geography 34: 35–51. doi:10.1016/j.polgeo.2012.12.009.
Elden, S. 2015. “From Hinterland to the Global: New Books on Historical and Political
Understandings of Territory.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 33 (1):
185–190. doi:10.1068/d3301rev.
Elden, S. 2016a. Foucault’s Last Decade. Cambridge: Polity.
Elden, S. 2016b. “Foucault and Geometrics.” In World Politics with Foucault, edited by
P. Bonditti, D. Bigo, and F. Gros, New York, NY: Zone Books. 2015.
Elden, S. 2017. Foucault: The Birth of Power. Cambridge: Polity.
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Ground Rent and Rural Sociology.” Antipode. Advance online publication. doi:10.1111/
anti.12171.
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Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press.
 6 Book review symposium

Hagen, J. 2014. “The Birth of Territory.” Geographical Review 104 (3): 380–383. doi:10.1111/
gere.2014.104.issue-3.
Kearns, G. 2014. “Stuart Elden, 2013 The Birth of Territory.” Society and Space. Advance online
publication. http://societyandspace.com/reviews/reviews-archive/elden/.
Lefebvre, H. 2009. State, Space, World: Selected Essays. edited by N. Brenner and S. Elden,
translated by Gerald Moore, Neil Brenner and Stuart Elden. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Lefebvre, H. 2015. “The Theory of Ground Rent and Rural Sociology.” Antipode. Advance online
publication. doi:10.1111/anti.12172.
Legg, S., M. Heffernan, B. McDonagh, J. J. Cohen, S. Sassen, and S. Elden. 2015. “The Birth of
Territory: A Review Forum.” Journal of Historical Geography. Advance online publication.
doi:10.1016/j.jhg.2015.08.012.
Minca, C., J. W. Crampton, J. Bryan, J. J. Fall, A. B. Murphy, A. Paasi, and S. Elden. 2015.
“Reading Stuart Elden’s The Birth of Territory.” Political Geography 46: 93–101. doi:10.1016/
j.polgeo.2014.09.002.
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Nietzsche, F. 1994. On the Genealogy of Morality. edited by K. A. Pearson, translated by Carole

Diethe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Strandsbjerg, J. 2010. Territory, Globalization and International Relations: The Cartographic
Reality of Space. London: Palgrave.
Strandsbjerg, J. 2015. “Review. The Birth of Territory, by Stuart Elden.” Global Discourse.
Advance online publication. doi:10.1080/23269995.2015.1024453.

Stuart Elden
University of Warwick and Monash University
Stuart.Elden@warwick.ac.uk
© 2015, Stuart Elden
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23269995.2015.1106722

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