From the archive

For what Tuck has established is that modern natural-law theory was forged in integral connexion with "the kind of militarist and imperialist expansion in which the Dutch and English writers gloried." The commercial and colonial expansion of the Dutch and English states in the seventeenth century could be considered, from the angle of the European international order at the time, as something of a sideshow. But Tuck demonstrates with great erudition and theoretical acuity that it was absolutely central to the substance of the modern natural-law tradition, out of which contemporary rights-based liberal individualism has grown. His book might more properly be called "The Origins of Anglo-American Liberalism in the Legitimation of Imperial Expansion."

The Origins of Atlantic Liberalism