Territory is a distinctive feature of modern international politics, but there is little consensus over what about it is distinctively modern. Recent scholarship in historical international relations (IR) takes modern territoriality to be defined by the practice of creating and enforcing borders. Scholarship therefore dismisses the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, once thought to be the origin of the sovereign territorial state, because it did not change border practices. However, this approach ignores legal history. I argue that territory is a legal concept, and a history of modern territoriality must explain under what conditions rulers expressed their authority as territorial in nature. This article explains why the legal evolution of territorial rights (landeshoheit, iure territorii) in early modern Europe was distinctive of the Holy Roman Empire (HRE). While national monarchies asserted their “sovereignty” as non-territorial in order to capture overseas empires, the HRE developed a legal doctrine of territorially circumscribed jurisdiction within the imperial hierarchy. The Peace of Westphalia was a culminating event in which diverse privileges were recast as a single territorial right. Territorial autonomy was not only consistent with the hierarchy of the HRE but was fundamental to preserving it. This article has two contributions. First, it adds to recent scholarship on modern territoriality by explaining how legal history furnished the preconditions for ruling territory. Second, it places Westphalia and the empire’s legal history within the recent turn toward empire in historical IR. An important source for the development of international law was the internal constitution of the HRE. This prompts us to reconsider the notion that international law assumes a world of sovereign territorial states. On the contrary, early international law concerned territorial states nested within imperial hierarchy, not the anarchy of sovereignty.

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为什么威斯特伐利亚仍然重要：帝国统治下的领土权利

领土是现代国际政治的一个显着特征，但对于什么是现代国际政治的独特特征却鲜有共识。历史国际关系（IR）领域的最新学术研究将现代领土性定义为创建和执行边界的实践。因此，学术界对 1648 年《威斯特伐利亚和约》不屑一顾，该和约一度被认为是主权领土国家的起源，因为它并没有改变边界惯例。然而，这种方法忽视了法律历史。我认为，领土是一个法律概念，现代领土性的历史必须解释统治者在什么条件下表达其领土性权威。本文解释了为什么近代早期欧洲领土权（landeshoheit、iure territorii）的法律演变具有神圣罗马帝国（HRE）的特色。虽然国家君主国为了夺取海外帝国而宣称其“主权”是非领土性的，但神圣罗马帝国却在帝国等级制度内制定了领土管辖权的法律学说。威斯特伐利亚和约是一个高潮事件，其中多种特权被重新塑造为单一的领土权利。领土自治不仅与神圣罗马帝国的等级制度一致，而且是维护它的基础。本文有两个贡献。首先，它通过解释法律史如何为统治领土提供先决条件，补充了最近关于现代领土性的学术成果。其次，它将威斯特伐利亚和帝国的法律史置于历史国际关系中最近转向帝国的范围内。国际法发展的一个重要来源是神圣罗马帝国的内部宪法。这促使我们重新考虑国际法假定世界上有主权领土国家的观念。相反，早期国际法关注的是帝国等级制度中的领土国家，而不是主权的无政府状态。