Seven collected essays, including the Introduction and Epilogue, examine the impact on Romanist scholarship of Carlo Sigonio (1522/23-1584), a Renaissance thinker whose legal interpretation of the "settler-colony" in Roman experience and practice influenced thinkers contemporary to and following him - Machiavelli, Bodin, Anglo-American writers and political actors from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, among others. The case is convincingly made that intra-Empire relations can be as useful as inter-Empire or Empire-outsider relations for appreciating how the antecedents of the contemporary State system operated.
Jeremia Pelgrom is an assistant professor at Groningen University. His research focuses on Roman Republican colonialism and Italian landscape archaeology. He has co-directed two research projects funded by the Dutch research council (NWO): Landscapes of Early Roman Colonization (with Tesse D. Stek) and Mapping the via Appia (with Stephan Mols and Eric Moormann), and he is co-editor of Roman Republican Colonization. New perspectives from Archaeology and Ancient History (2014).
Arthur Weststeijn is a research fellow at the University of Padua. He specializes in intellectual history and the history of political thought, with a particular focus on early-modern republicanism and imperialism. He is the author of Commercial Republicanism in the Dutch Golden Age (2012) and co-editor of Ancient Models in the Early Modern Republican Imagination (2017) and The Dutch Empire between Ideas and Practice, 1600-2000 (2019).