ABSTRACT
This chapter revisits the history of one of international law's foundational concepts – sovereignty – and examines its deep anthropocentric structure. It shows that, from the sixteenth century onwards, the transformation and subjection of nature's forces by man have been posited as a primordial and constitutive act of sovereignty and that, as a result, sovereignty has been denied to (primarily non-European) societies deemed to be failing in their duty to tame the natural world to enable human development. In other words, the exploitation of nature is not merely a legally protected attribute but, in more ways than one, a core requisite of sovereignty. International law is thus anthropocentric in a more profound and radical way than is usually acknowledged: It does not merely enable or facilitate the exploitation of nature but in fact demands it.
