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Today human rights and capabilities are two intertwined concepts, each subject to contemporary critique. In the early modern period, these were much debated and literature was a key site for the development of these imperfect, variable and contested discourses. Reading literary works from the European tradition, in particular in Europeans' engagement with dissident groups both within (women, religious dissidents, the Irish) and outside Europe (Ottoman, African, American), we will explore themes of: exclusion, embodiment, risk, vulnerability, and the languages and practices of equivalence and domination in the variable discourses of humanitarianism, population and resource management and natural law in authors including Shakespeare, Grotius, Montaigne, Hobbes, Behn, Locke, Astell, Swift, Montagu and Defoe.