Adopting a global approach, Fitzmaurice analyses the laws that shaped modern European empires from medieval times to the twentieth century.

Acknowledgements; 1. Introduction; 2. Occupation from Roman law to Salamanca; 3. The Salamanca School in England; 4. Occupation and convention; 5. Theories of occupation in the eighteenth century; 6. The Seven Years' War, land speculation and the American Revolution; 7. Occupation in the nineteenth century; 8. Res nullius and sovereignty; 9. Territorium nullius and Africa; 10. Terra nullius and the Polar regions; 11. Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.

Andrew Fitzmaurice is Associate Professor of History at the University of Sydney. He is the author of Humanism and America: An Intellectual History of English Colonisation, 1500-1625 (Cambridge, 2003), and co-editor of Shakespeare and Early Modern Political Thought (Cambridge, 2009).