A definition

Territory is generally defined in international relations or political geography as something along the following lines: ‘A territory is a bounded space under the control of a group of people – usually, today, a State.’ That definition tells us something about territory, but it also opens up a number of questions that we might want to ask about what we mean by “space”, and what we mean by borders or “defined” or “under the control of a group of people”. That, for me, is the beginning point of an investigation into the question of territory rather than the end point. Often, what you find in academic work on the question of territory is that the definition is seen as very straightforward, but territory is always very complicated, when you’re looking at where borders are, who owns big pieces of land, whether there’s a dispute over these questions and so on.

Territory matters

Photo by skimin0k.

With the partial exception of Antarctica and some parts of the high seas, almost every portion of the Earth’s surface is divided up into territory. It’s under the control of a nation state that claims exclusive control within that territory of what happens in that area, what the people in that area do, where they pay their taxes and so on. So, there are a number of instances where a boundary really matters. Do you pay your taxes in France or in Switzerland, depending on where you live, depending on where you work?

These kinds of questions are very important today. Territorial disputes, boundary disputes between States still continue. Whether we’re looking at the civil war in Syria, or the situation of Ukraine in relation to Russia, or who owns bits of the sea in order to license an oil company to drill for oil in those places, territory really matters today.

People, power and place

The way that we understand territory today is not the way that we have always understood the relation between people, power and place. In my work, I’ve tried to explore how we might historically think about that relation. That’s not to say that we always have a sense of territory, and all we need to do is to understand where the boundaries were at different times in different places. It may be that, historically, people have understood that relation between people, power and place in slightly different ways – that it might be to do with exclusive control over land, with very clear borders.

It might also be to do with a city that controls its urban space and has a city wall. Then it controls, to a varying degree, the land outside of the city walls for agriculture, for where some people might live. But in times of threat, the people might retreat behind the city walls. On that model, you have a concentration of power within the city, but then you have a dispersal of power outside of the walls of the city that may fizzle out into a wild area of untamed land before you meet the land that is controlled, farmed, regulated by another political actor and another city.

So, these different ways of understanding the relation between politics and place are things that I’ve been very interested in, in trying to understand how it was that we got to the point where we can define territory simply as a bounded space under the control of a group of people.

Ancient Rome

Ancient Rome was very concerned with who controlled areas of land, in terms of the urban setting of Rome itself with its pomerium – the sacred boundary of Rome – the walls, the expansion of that area and then the expansion of Rome’s control throughout the Italian peninsula. Rome would have spread its control through that area around the Mediterranean to a greater or lesser extent, into the deserts of North Africa and so on. But Rome didn’t really think of itself as a territory; Rome rather understood itself to be an imperium.

It’s worth noting that the word territory, although it derives from the Latin territorium, is a very rare word in classical Latin. It’s used only in a handful of instances by the canonical classical Latin authors. It’s never used by the historians. So, Tacitus, Livy and Caesar never use the word territorium. Instead, when they’re trying to think about the relation between people, land and the political control over it, they use a range of different words. They use areas, they use questions around fines, or the limits of Rome. They’re interested in political power over place, but they’re not interested in using the same kind of vocabulary that we use today.

Territorium and jurisdiction

Territorium becomes an important word in some legal texts, and it’s found in some land surveying texts. It becomes a much more common word in the late Middle Ages, and particularly in some of the disputes in the Holy Roman Empire. Who has jurisdiction? Is it the pope? Is it the emperor, who is anointed by the pope? Or is it the individual king, or the free city, or the principality, or the duchy? There are lots of disputes about whose law applies in particular places.

Here you find some interesting Italian jurists in the 14th century who make the claim that territory and jurisdiction go together. One of them says it’s like mist in a swamp. You can’t have one without the other. The question of jurisdiction is that you have that power in a particular area, a territorium, and to be the ruler of a territorium is to exercise jurisdiction. So, the spatial definition of a legal question becomes very important in some of those disputes, and they get picked up again in the 17th century in particular.

The Peace of Westphalia

The Ratification of the Treaty of Münster, 15 May 1648, by Gerard ter Borch, in the collection of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.

The Peace of Westphalia are the two treaties that brought an end to the thirty-year religious war in continental Europe. Westphalia is often looked at as the moment when the modern territorial nation state was born – the beginning of an international system. That’s very misleading. There is something in the Westphalian treaties around territorial right which is certainly important. However, what I found when I was doing historical work on this was that it’s actually a range of debates that happened after the Westphalian treaties, when some of the rulers were thinking what kind of power do I have? What is the power of the Duke of Hanover, for example, in relation to the emperor?

The Duke of Hanover had, as his court historian, Gottfried Leibniz, the philosopher and mathematician. He set Leibniz on the task of thinking about what is the power that I, the Duke of Hanover, have in this post-Westphalian, continental Europe? So, Gottfried Leibniz comes up with a very brief, snappy definition. He’s asked what sovereignty is, and answers: ‘To be sovereign is to be master of a territory.’ He’s drawing a distinction between sovereignty and majesty. Sovereignty is the power that an individual ruler has over the people that live within the area that they control.

That still means that the pope and the emperor can have jurisdiction over people’s spiritual lives, but over their lives from birth to death – their temporal life on this Earth – that’s the power of the individual sovereign. It’s actually in Leibniz, rather than perhaps the more famous political thinkers of the 17th century – Thomas Hobbes, John Locke – that we find a strikingly modern definition of this idea of sovereignty as connected to the question of territory.

Re-thinking our urban landscapes

Historically, cities would have been understood as having territories. Territorium, when it is used in classical Latin, tends to mean the area outside of the city walls that is under the control of a city. So, a city has a territorium. Today, we tend to think of a territory as having cities within it, so the relation, in a sense, has been reversed.

Work on urban questions, urban geography, urban studies more generally, has often used the language of territory to understand things. Has the urban been territorialised? In other words, has the urban been mapped, regulated, controlled, ordered, organised? Or has territory become increasingly urbanised?

‘Concentrated urbanism’

One of the things that is happening increasingly today is the spread of the urban into areas that previously would have been understood as the rural. Some of the most interesting work that’s going on within urban studies at the moment is a challenge to the earlier idea of urbanisation as based on agglomeration or concentration of bodies into a particular narrow place.

The urban sprawl of Melbourne. Aerial view of central Melbourne (February 2005). Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.

This is ‘concentrated urbanism’, an idea put forward by Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid. In contrast to concentrated urbanism, they have an idea of ‘extended urbanisation’. What is it that the city does outside of the boundaries of the political definition of the city? Where does it get its water from? Where does it get its electricity from? Where does its waste get buried? What are the transport networks that bring people to work in that area? The urban fabric is extending far beyond the boundaries of the central business district or the downtown or the inner city area.

Globalisation and territory

Globalisation can be understood as an extension of the idea of territorialisation, but now to the scale of the Earth itself, rather than simply to an individual nation state. If we’re understanding globalisation, we need to think about territory much more seriously rather than thinking that it is to do with either deterritorialisation or reterritorialisation. It’s the making and remaking of spatial relations, the continual process of thinking about territory.

Territory is not made once and for all by a State and then remains static and fixed. You could look at large-scale infrastructure projects, transportation systems or resource extraction. These make, remake, shape and change the territory of a State. A State makes its territory, but it doesn’t make it without any kind of reference to what has happened before, nor is it entirely fixed in what is there already. States can change their borders. They can build fortifications on their borders. They can damn rivers for water storage or for energy use. So, States can do a number of things to change and transform their territories.

Climate change is transforming borders

One of the things that’s happening now at a much faster speed than had been happening before is the way that climate change is transforming the way that we understand the borders of States. This might be to do with sea level rise, which is changing coastlines. It might be to do with glacier melt, which is changing the topography of a mountain range. It might be to do with the way that rivers are flowing in different directions. If a river was used as a boundary between States, then the change of a river course can transform – this land can appear on one side of the river, having previously been on the other side of the river. Deserts can grow.

These kinds of natural processes that are sped up by anthropogenic climate change are actually shaping and changing the way that territories are. One of the key challenges for political geography and other fields that are looking at the question of territory is to take much better account of these transformations and the interrelation of human action and the physical landscape.

Discover more about

territory

Elden, S. (2013). The Birth of Territory. The University of Chicago Press.

Elden, S. (2009). Terror and Territory: The Spatial Extent of Sovereignty. University Of Minnesota Press.

The relation between people, power and place