Stuart Elden (Durham University)

From Territorium to Territory

What is the Latin word for 'territory'? How should we translate
territorium? This talk will suggest that neither question has a
straight-forward answer.  Beginning with the rare instances of the use
of the word territorium in classical Latin, I discuss the variant
meanings given to the term in Cicero, Varro, and Pomponius. Rather, in
writers such as Caesar, Tacitus and Livy a number of different  expressions are used to outline control of terrain and  possession of  land. The term becomes more common in the early Middle Ages, in   writers such as Isidore of Seville and Gregory of Tours. Yet even here  the term admits of a number of meanings and can only crudely be  equated with 'territory'. The last part of the paper shows how the  question of territorium became a key concern in debates around the  interpretation of Roman law in the fourteenth  century. In the  post-glossators territorium becomes the object of jurisdiction, of  political and legal power, and defines its extent.  It thus becomes a  term much closer to the contemporary meaning of 'territory'. The talk  concludes with a discussion of why thinking territory historically is  helpful in understanding contemporary global politics, especially in  terms of the profound changes  taking place in the post-Cold War  period concerning the relation between territory and sovereignty.

Biography

Stuart Elden is Professor of political geography at Durham University  and the editor of the journal Environment and Planning D: Society and  Space. His most recent books are Speaking Against Number: Heidegger,  Language and the Politics of Calculation (Edinburgh University Press,  2006), and Terror and Territory: The Spatial Extent of Sovereignty  (University of Minnesota Press, 2009). Between 2008 and 2011 he is  working on a history of the concept of territory, funded by a  Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship. He can be contacted at:
stuart.elden@durham.ac.uk