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.