This clearly written scholarly book concerns political theories expressed from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, especially in Western Europe. More particularly, the volume is about the ways in which thinking on the nature, origins, and limitations of state power was linked to developing ideas on European colonies (particularly in America) and to the interactions of Europeans with peoples in other continents.

The first part of the book is about the growth of thinking on international law and the law of nations in and after the sixteenth century. It concentrates on the ideas of the early sixteenth-century Spanish Dominican Francisco de Vitoria, who voiced a cosmopolitan humanitarianism toward the American Indians, and who expressed skepticism about the moral and legal justifiability of the Spanish conquests of their lands. Vitoria's thinking is compared to that of Immanuel Kant, who was arguably a still stronger advocate of cosmopolitanism than the Spaniard. This opening section also briefly discusses the ideas on the freedom of the seas of Hugo Grotius and John Selden. In an entertaining chapter, the book connects ideas about maritime freedom with the activities of pirates, who were sometimes perhaps motivated not only by material ambition but by utopian political ideas.

The second part of the work concerns ideas about the state, absolute monarchy, and colonies in the thinking of humanists, and especially in the works of Sir Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes. The third and final part centers on theories that focus on the political role of the people, and discusses the connections between such thought and the European colonial experience of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The two main authors discussed here are John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. This section ends with a lively account of theory and practice in the Haitian revolution of 1791–1804. Some themes that crop up in all three sections are slavery, religious rights and secular freedoms, cosmopolitanism, and the laws of nature and nations. In addition to the five thinkers named in the title—Vitoria, Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau—many other writers make brief appearances, and a few are more frequent guests, including Michel Foucault, Hannah Arendt, Jacques Derrida, and Carl Schmitt.

This book began life in 2011 as a PhD dissertation in philosophy at the Université Paris-Sorbonne. Both the book and the original dissertation take a broadly philosophical approach to the history of ideas, ranging boldly over large areas and long periods without dwelling unduly upon narrow matters of historical context. The work is aimed primarily at a francophone audience. It cites non-French authors in French editions and translations. So, for example, no English editions of Bacon or Hobbes are here referred to. Moreover, relatively little modern anglophone scholarship has been deployed. Sir John Elliott makes no appearance, though he is one of the most prolific and influential of all historians of early modern Spain and the Spanish Empire. Similarly absent is Anthony Pagden, who has written widely on the theory and practice of Spanish colonialism and imperialism, and who coedited Vitoria's Political Writings for the well-known series Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (1991). There is a sole reference to Quentin Skinner, though the book cited does not appear in the bibliography. A single work by Richard Tuck is listed there but is not referred to in the text.

Sometimes the lack of attention paid to scholarship in English has caused substantive problems. The General History of pirates, published in 1724 under the name of Captain Charles Johnson, is here ascribed to Daniel Defoe, but that attribution is now widely considered to be dubious or just plain wrong. The book refers (390) to a work with the title Britania Lenguens, by William Peyt, presented to Parliament in 1880. This must be a reference to Britannia Languens of 1680, by William Petty. The volume could have been better proofread, and more fully revised to take account of modern English-language scholarship. But it makes entertaining, instructive, and informative reading. It is especially valuable in providing a convenient introduction to recent French scholarship on early modern theories of the state and colonial problems.