Dominus Mundi: Land, Sea and Global Sovereignty

The aim of this article is to offer a close reading of the assertion to be found in Digest 14.2.9 to the effect that the Roman emperor is the legitimate Master of the World,and to propose a consideration of the actual relevance of the provision to account for the ‘legal origins’ of contemporary theories of the world order. Long after it had been composed, this characterisation of the position of the Roman emperor was still deemed to carry great significance, for example at the time of Frederick I and Frederick II when it was used to define the imperial prerogatives, and later still under Charles V when it supplied European imperialism with an ideological basis in the era of the colonization of the Americas. Indeed, the text of the Digest surfaced again recently in the work of Pierre Legendre to refer to the new technical world-governance by private agents.