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).

• 1: Jeremia Pelgrom and Arthur Weststeijn: Introduction: Settler Colonies Between Roman Colonial Utopia and Modern Colonial Practice 2: William Stenhouse: Roman Colonies and the Distribution of Land before Sigonio 3: John Rich: The Mommsen of the Renaissance: Sigonio, the De antiquo iure populi Romani, and Roman Republican Colonization 4: Mark Somos: Sigonio in Anglo-American Projects to Reform the Imperial Constitution, 1751-1777 5: Mattia Balbo: Roman Colonization and Land Division between Enlightenment and Romanticism: Beaufort and Niebuhr 6: Luigi Capogrossi Colognesi: Roman Colonization in Twentieth-Century Historiography 7: Christopher Smith: Epilogue: Reflections on the Past and Future of the Roman Colonial Discourse

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.