726227

research-article2017
IRE0010.1177/0047117817726227International RelationsPitts

Article

International Relations
2017, Vol. 31(3) 282–298
International relations and © The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/0047117817726227
https://doi.org/10.1177/0047117817726227
International Law journals.sagepub.com/home/ire

Jennifer Pitts
The University of Chicago

Abstract
Just as the contemporary global structure is a product of nineteenth-century economic and
political developments, namely, industrial capitalism and global empires dominated by European
metropoles, a misleading conception of the international system as composed of formally equal
sovereign states is a product of the same period, as Vattel’s conception of states as equal moral
persons was taken up and transformed in the early nineteenth century, especially in imperial
Britain. This model continues to shape interpretations of global politics in International Relations
(IR), despite the persistence of the imperial legacy in the form of a stratified globe. Historical
work informed by postcolonial studies and recent scholarship in International Law can give IR
greater analytical and critical purchase on the current global order.

Keywords
contextualism, historical turn, imperialism, international order, International Relations,
Westphalian myth

For the second half of the twentieth century, the discipline of International Relations (IR)
operated largely in isolation from the other academic specialties that once shared its orbit
– international law, political theory, intellectual history, and the history of political
thought. IR has relied on stylized histories, of its traditions (realist, solidarist/pluralist,
and liberal), of a series of founding fathers, and of watershed moments, above all 1648.
In European and British scholarship, the long separation from political thought – what
David Armitage called the ‘fifty years’ rift’ – has begun to narrow, although American IR

Corresponding author:
Jennifer Pitts, Department of Political Science, The University of Chicago, 5828 S. University Ave, Room 401,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA.
Email: jpitts@uchicago.edu
Pitts 283

has remained aloof.1 Contextual history has been central to these developments, as schol-
ars have revisited the thought of those who serve as the founding figures in IR’s origin
narratives – Machiavelli, Grotius, Hobbes, Kant, and others – to recapture a more
nuanced understanding of their own preoccupations, which had little to do with the
shadow boxing they have been made to do in IR debates over realist or liberal ‘tradi-
tions’.2 Efforts have similarly been made toward a rapprochement between International
Relations and International Law (again, mostly outside the United States), though the
disciplines are conducted as largely separate conversations.3 The roots of IR are in
International Law – both in their shared ‘founders’ such as Grotius and Hobbes, and in
the early twentieth-century origins of the professional discipline of IR.4 But while the
two disciplines of IR and International Law have grown apart, they share a number of
features that stem from their shared nineteenth- and early twentieth-century history.
These include aspirations to the status of science, a dependence on stylized histories
populated by founding fathers and origin myths, a reliance on sovereignty as a founda-
tional principle, a tendency to regard empires and imperialism as historically superseded
and also ‘incidental to the discipline proper’, and a blindness to their own participation
in structures and discourses of racialized hierarchy.5 It is not clear that the recent efforts
to bring the fields together fully address the disciplines’ shared problems of Eurocentricity
and lack of a critical orientation toward their own history. Even if Waltzian realism’s
archetypal articulation of the conception is considered superseded, more recent bodies of
literature continue to theorize international relations as if conducted among formally
equal sovereign units, including some bodies of IR that are in dialogue with International
Law, such as rational design liberalism.6
During this same period, however, International Law itself has taken a historical turn
from which IR has much to learn. This scholarship in the critical history of international
law has radically challenged the dominant strain in which the history of international law
had been written.7 The older mode had presented the history of international law as a
story of progress toward an ever more rational and humane global order, with law as the
‘gentle civiliser of nations’, in the nineteenth-century phrase made famous by Martti
Koskenniemi, the most prolific and influential of the new historians. In the older story,
international law was a unique achievement of European civilization, made possible by
the legacy of Roman law, with its conception of the universal applicability of ius gentium
and its conception of the rule of law, and the diplomatic interactions of diverse and rela-
tively small European states, forced by their proximity to one another to work out means
of mutual toleration and rules for the preservation of peace and the conduct of war.8
Historians of international law once shared with IR the view of 1648 as the originary
moment of the modern international order, though the notion was discredited in interna-
tional law even before the recent spate of works exposing the ‘myth of 1648’.9 And yet
within IR, the myth remains robust because it usefully crystallizes the foundational idea
that the international realm is one of sovereign states without a common superior that are
formally equal, even if they clearly differ in material power. As Tarak Barkawi has writ-
ten in an exhaustive and revealing review of the continuing dominance within much
‘disciplinary IR’ (across rival paradigms of realism, constructivism, and liberalism) of
the idea that formally equal sovereign, territorial nation-states are the basic units of inter-
national relations: ‘security studies and IR lack a coherent and developed body of inquiry
284 International Relations 31(3)

on questions of empire … This is an astonishing but also constitutive absence’. The

‘states under anarchy’ assumption, as Barkawi notes, not only continues to form the
conceptual starting point for much theorizing in IR, but it also underlies the discipline’s
most important (and ostensibly theoretically neutral) sources of empirical data, above all
the Correlates of War and Militarized Interstate Disputes datasets.10 The persistence of
the Westphalian myth also has the effect of reinforcing the misleading idea that the cur-
rent global order is one that emerged from the interactions of early modern European
states and then gradually expanded outward, finally becoming global with decoloniza-
tion.11 This model continues to shape IR’s interpretation of global politics, despite the
involvement in the politics and theorization of colonial governance, and the overt
defenses of global racial hierarchies, by international lawyers and international relations
scholars in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as recent work in IR has
shown so powerfully.12 The legacies of that imperial history include not only the acute
ongoing effects of imperial relations in formerly colonized societies but also the more
often overlooked but similarly transformative effects on metropolitan states, their econo-
mies, their militaries, and their politics, of phenomena ranging from the global slave
trade and the appropriation of vast agricultural land in the western hemisphere, to the
wars of decolonization, and the myriad proxy and covert wars of the post–Second World
War period.13
Despite some clear differences between IR and International Law, above all the reluc-
tance of much IR scholarship to make overtly normative arguments, their shared deeper
history means that the critical history of international law should also be understood as a
history of IR. This work attends to the persistently hierarchical structure of the global
order, what Antony Anghie has called the ‘dynamic of difference embodied in the very
structure, logic and identity of international institutions’ and to the outsized role of the
nineteenth-century British Empire in the establishment of institutions of international
order.14 In The Global Transformation, Barry Buzan and George Lawson have made a
powerful case that IR as a discipline is hamstrung by its failure to recognize that the
modern world is the product of nineteenth-century changes in the global political, mili-
tary, and economic order. They argue that the orientation of the discipline around other
ostensible watersheds – 1648, 1919, 1945, 1989 – obscures the more important dynamics
that were established with the onset of global industrial modernity over the course of the
nineteenth century, including the establishment of a core-periphery structure, the co-
constitution of nation-states and global empires, and an ideology of progress and civili-
zation that justified and made sense of these developments. Their book, which synthesizes
recent work in global history and historical sociology, poses a pointed challenge to much
mainstream IR, one that buttresses postcolonial scholarship, some of it arising within the
discipline (again, mostly by scholars outside the US), that emphasizes the systematically
hierarchical and racialized nature of the international order.15
In this article, I pursue one aspect of the nineteenth-century legacy for international
relations to show that even as the major European states were becoming global empires,
analysts of international law and politics were conceiving of the ‘international’ realm as
a community of free and equal nations that emerged in Europe, and of European political
society as distinctively free of the outdated and atavistic politics of imperial domination.
The implications of this disjuncture for their ability, and that of modern IR, to theorize
Pitts 285

and evaluate global political relations and events have been profound. To the extent that
the discipline continues to take its conceptual bearings from the idea that the current
international order is one whose key feature is the formal independence of states in a
condition of anarchy and sees that feature as having been forged within early modern
Europe in isolation from the rest of the world, it will be ill-equipped to analyze many of
the most important dynamics of the modern world order, from the persistent asymmetries
between the global north and global south, to the proliferation of violence within states,
to vast population movements and environmental degradation.

The state model in a world of empires: Vattel

A conception of the international came into focus in Europe in the seventeenth and eight-
eenth centuries. It was during this period that historians and political writers came to
understand Europe as a ‘states-system’, worthy of analysis in its own right rather than
simply the product of actions by states and statesmen, whose coming into being they saw
as one of the great achievements of modern European civilization.16 Yet alongside the
rapid growth of European states’ global empires in the eighteenth century, there devel-
oped an ideological self-conception of European states as non-imperial, in contrast to
despotic Asian states that were said to be imperial by nature. According to an argument
that became influential in the eighteenth century and dominant in the nineteenth,
Europeans alone, thanks to unique qualities or developments, had managed to develop a
body of legal doctrine governing reciprocal relations between states, which ought to be
authoritative for the entire globe, and which they were, therefore, justified in imposing
on others. Proponents of such a view sought a variety of candidates for the decisive
European features, including respect for the individual as a unique legacy of Christianity,
a distinctive appreciation for the rule of law as a legacy of Rome, and a varied geography
that led to a plurality of states that were forced by their relative equality to accommodate
themselves to one another.17
Montesquieu contributed prominently to this line of thought, arguing that while other
parts of the world were doomed to suffer under vast despotic empires, Europe alone was
composed of a plurality of moderate states characterized by the rule of law internally and
mutual respect externally. Montesquieu’s portrait of oriental despotism served as a foil
for his conception of the European state system. Despotic states, in his account, are
antipolitical in their simplicity: that is, among their component parts, they lack relations
of mutual accommodation, constraint, resistance, and negotiation. In despotic states,
Montesquieu argued, ‘the prince’s will, once known, should produce its effect as infal-
libly as does one ball thrown against another. No tempering, modification, accommoda-
tion, terms, alternatives, negotiations, remonstrances, nothing as good or better can be
proposed’.18 A consequence of this antipolitical quality of despotism was that such
regimes, according to Montesquieu, were equally incapable of engaging other states on
terms of mutuality, as was characteristic of European diplomacy and law of nations.
Despotic states operated through conquest and engaged in a fundamentally different
mode of interstate interaction than republics and monarchies; they were ill suited to
coexistence with other equal and independent states. While a despotism, he argued, ‘will
be in the best situation when it is able to consider itself as alone in the world, when it is
286 International Relations 31(3)

surrounded by deserts and separated from the peoples it calls barbarians’, the court life
of monarchies cultivates flexibility and mutual respect among members of the ruling
class.19 These qualities had prepared Europe’s moderate regimes to coexist in a commu-
nity of relatively equal states that, because of their close proximity, had to tolerate one
another, negotiate, and come to terms, even if they also engaged in war and commercial
exploitation. Montesquieu’s suggestion that Asian despotisms are incapable of regarding
foreigners as anything other than barbarians represents an early episode in the European
preoccupation with the idea that the Chinese, especially, regard all foreigners as inferiors
(a concern that increased ironically and unselfconsciously alongside the greater promi-
nence of the civilized-barbarous distinction in European theorizing about international
relations).20 Montesquieu, then, crystallized an ideological picture of European states as
constitutively anti-imperial (though not inevitably so, for the argument was partly driven
by anxieties that European states would fall prey to Eastern-style despotism), as the pre-
serve of freedom, as forming a unique community of states capable of tempering their
hostility through the law of nations and diplomatic flexibility.
The law of nations was one of the most important discourses in which theorists articu-
lated Europe’s claim to regard itself uniquely as the bearer of universal values. Within
that discourse, we find a persistent tension between, on one hand, the belief in a universal
order in which all of humanity is already included (the law of nations as the law of
nature) and, on the other hand, an ingathering of global politics into a historically
European order (the law of nations as European public law). By the turn of the nineteenth
century, the European states-system and its public law were coming to be seen as stand-
ing in for the international as a whole. The turn of the nineteenth century is clearly a
watershed in a number of respects, including the adoption of the very term international,
coined by Jeremy Bentham in the early 1780s.21 Histories of the subject were being writ-
ten for the first time.22 The modern fixation on the Peace of Westphalia as the origin of
the international system likewise began in this counter-revolutionary ideological
moment, as Edward Keene has shown.23 Writing at the transformative moment in the
history of thinking about international relations in the decades around the turn of the
nineteenth century, Vattel and Bentham were both, in their very different ways, pivotal
figures in the development of modern international thought. There are many contrasts to
be drawn between their approaches, from the difference of terminology to the substantial
role for natural law in Vattel’s account versus Bentham’s aggressive utilitarian hostility
to naturalism. I focus here on the different ways they conceptualized the global legal
order and its participants and especially the place of empires in the pictures that they
painted of the international realm.
Perhaps Vattel’s most powerful contribution to international thought was his depiction
of states or nations – he used the terms interchangeably – as moral persons.24 States appear
in his account as communities in which all the individual members are morally bound to
work together on their individual and collective self-perfection. He depicts a world of
such nations dealing with each other as legal equals no matter their size or their relative
power – in his famous analogy, ‘a sovereign prince, however low he may rank in the scale
of power, is as completely sovereign and independent as the greatest monarch, in the same
manner as a dwarf is a man equally with a giant’.25 This vision of diverse communities
granted legal equality, and the autonomy to work out their collective lives together free
Pitts 287

from the interference of outsiders, is in many ways a powerfully attractive one. Its critical
potential, as grounds for treating diverse peoples equitably, has been drawn upon from the
time of Vattel’s earliest readers, such as Edmund Burke, who cited Vattel when charging
that Britain had violated the law of nations in relation to Indian polities and in expropriat-
ing Jewish merchants in the West Indies during the American Revolutionary War.26 British
critics of the first Opium War likewise used Vattel to argue for China’s equal rights under
the law of nations, as I note below. And for C.H. Alexandrowicz, arguing in the 1950s for
the legal equality of newly decolonized states, Vattel represented a principled legal uni-
versalism that predated nineteenth-century Eurocentric positivism.27 But Vattel presented
an international community of equal sovereign nations not simply as an aspiration or
normative standard but also as a plausible description of the world around him: one that
rendered opaque the fact that Europe’s most important powers were highly differentiated,
hierarchical global empires with European metropoles rather than national (and implicitly
territorially bounded) communities.28 It is in this form, as an empirical schema, that IR has
taken up the Vattelian conceptualization of the international system.29
Vattel’s influential account of the state as a moral person, and of the international
arena as an egalitarian society of such persons, produced a deceptive picture of the inter-
national realm, one that gave little conceptual purchase on the features of hierarchy and
imperial extension that characterized the world system in Vattel’s day, and from his day
through to the present. Vattel’s own seeming indifference to the global and imperial
dimensions of the interstate politics of his day may be due in part to biography: he was a
Swiss subject of the Prussian king Frederick the Great and a diplomat most concerned
with continental politics in the German states.30 The global imperial concerns of France
and Britain that were such a dominant part of those states’ experience of the Seven Years’
War and subsequent decades through the fall of Napoleon – and thus for French and
British thinkers such as Diderot or Bentham or Adam Smith – were muted for Vattel in a
way that shaped his influential framing of the ostensibly ‘universal’ law of nations, as
much in his occlusions and omissions as in his overt arguments.31 The unselfconscious
universality of Vattel’s text, that is, may stem from his distance from the truly global
politics of the major imperial states, France and Britain. Whatever the cause, the reper-
cussions were significant, for his model was to serve an important ideological function
in the context of European imperial expansion.
Vattel quickly became the major authority on the law of nations, especially in Britain,
so that his implicitly republican doctrine was put to work by an avowedly imperial
state.32 Joseph Chitty, the editor of the 1834 English edition of Vattel’s text, supple-
mented the text with British colonial and admiralty law and added interpretive notes to
make Vattel more clearly useful for British imperial dilemmas.33 Chitty’s edition was
well timed to contribute to British debates leading up to the first Opium War, in which
Vattel’s text was a ubiquitous point of reference, ‘constantly quoted by advocates of
war’, as one of their critics noted, and invoked similarly on the antiwar side.34 For those
who supported the use of military force to compel China to allow the opium trade,
Vattel’s arguments about commerce were inconvenient, because he categorically sup-
ported every state’s right to regulate commerce in whatever way it deemed in the best
interests of its people. He was especially emphatic about states’ right to prohibit the
entrance of foreign merchandise: any complaints against such prohibitions, he argued,
288 International Relations 31(3)

would be ‘ridiculous, since their only ground of complaint would be, that a profit is
refused to them by that nation, who does not choose that they should make it at her
expense’.35 Some pro-war authors quoted Vattel nonetheless, straining his meaning to
claim that nations are obliged to engage in commerce and to suggest that China’s conduct
had implied a tacit agreement to ‘carry on trade with us on equitable principles’, a line of
argument that Vattel had explicitly rejected. But others, recognizing that Vattel undercut
their position, bit the bullet and argued for excluding China from the community pro-
tected by the law of nations.36
Indeed, the pressure brought to bear on the pro-war position by a universalist applica-
tion of Vattel’s principles might be seen as a contributing factor in the movement toward
the exclusion of China from the ‘family of nations’ and in the displacement of a univer-
salist Vattel as an authority. Such a move is also visible in the American response to the
war. Former President John Quincy Adams gave a forceful defense of the war as a mem-
ber of Congress, embracing the Vattelian picture of a world of equal states but maintain-
ing that China had stubbornly excluded itself from such a community. The Chinese, he
argued, followed a ‘churlish and unsocial system’ that contravened the principle of
equality among nations that was the cornerstone of the European law of nations. The
crux of Adams’ argument was that China

admits no obligation to hold commercial intercourse with others. It utterly denies the equality
of other nations with itself, and even their independence. It holds … all other nations with
whom it has any relations, political or commercial, as outside tributary barbarians reverently
submissive to the will of its despotic chief.

Adams echoed Montesquieu’s contrast between the European principle of equality

among states and Asian states as despotic empires incapable of relations of equality and
reciprocity with other states. He described Britain as fighting for reciprocity and equality
and British power as a purely emancipatory force, and he expressed, ‘the hope that
Britain … will extend her liberating arm to the farthest bound of Asia, and at the close of
the present contest insist upon concluding the peace on terms of perfect equality with the
Chinese empire’.37
Antiwar texts appealed to Vattel in their rejection of attempts to exclude China from
the law of nations, insisting on the universality of that body of law in order to denounce
what they saw as the abuse of British power and British violation of the law of nations,
as the Chinese authorities did as well. When Commissioner Lin Zexu arrived in Canton
in March 1839 to enact the emperor’s anti-opium policy, one of his early requests was for
the translation of several passages from Vattel about commercial prohibitions, the right
of a state to confiscate contraband, and the right to wage war.38 The opium contraband
that Lin proclaimed later that year was entirely in keeping with Vattel’s principle that
states have perfect liberty to set and change at will their commercial policy. The trans-
lated passages were then published by Chinese state officials in a collection of European
thought.39 But China had turned to the premier European legal authority at a moment
when, in part precisely because of this conflict, Europeans were declaring that authority
outdated. When the American missionary W.A.P. Martin set out to translate a text of
international law into Chinese in the early 1860s, he considered Vattel but instead chose
Pitts 289

the American Henry Wheaton’s Elements of International Law, first published in 1836,
which he saw as more timely, arguably precisely because of Wheaton’s insistence that
the law of nations was not universal. This was an argument that Wheaton made ever
more insistently in the editions of his text published after the first Opium War, in which
he argued that international law ‘has always been, and still is, limited to the civilized and
Christian people of Europe or to those of European origin’. The ‘Mohammedan and
Pagan nations of Asia and Africa’, he now wrote, had recently shown an inclination

to renounce their peculiar international usages and adopt those of Christendom … The same
remark may be applied to the recent diplomatic transactions between the Chinese Empire and
the Christian nations of Europe and America, in which the former has been compelled to
abandon its inveterate anti-commercial and anti-social principles, and to acknowledge the
independence and equality of other nations in the mutual intercourse of war and peace.40

(Note that here again China appears as an empire and Britain as a nation.) The Opium
War, then, marks an important turning point, when the implications of Vattelian univer-
salism sat so uncomfortably with a dominant political position in a European imperial
state that Vattel had to be dismissed as an authority and China expelled from the com-
munity of states to whom the law of nations applied and, with other non-European states,
rendered candidates for entry into a European order rather than presumptive members of
a universal legal community. And yet Vattel’s legacy remained profound in the framing
of that European order as one of equal and independent nation-states, not global empires.
As international law came in the latter half of the nineteenth century to be increas-
ingly a self-conscious discipline, its major practitioners came to argue that it had to be
understood as a historically particular system that had arisen under the distinctive cir-
cumstances of early modern Europe and was constantly adjusting to the ‘growing wants
of a progressive civilization’.41 They were, consequently, preoccupied in a way that
Vattel had not been with delineating the scope of the international community, expound-
ing the criteria for admission into that community, managing its gradual expansion to
encompass some excluded states, and specifying the legal status of various societies they
deemed inadmissible. Vattel thus left a mixed legacy to twentieth-century international
thought: the critical purchase of his normative account of sovereign equality was lost in
the nineteenth-century rejection of his universalism, while his model lived on as a mis-
leading descriptive schema.

Bentham: an imperial global structure

An intriguing but ultimately failed alternative can be found in the evolution of Bentham’s
thought on international law and international relations. Bentham was perhaps the only
political thinker to rival Vattel’s influence on a global scale in the early nineteenth cen-
tury, with readers and correspondents from Latin America and Haiti to India and the
Middle East. Writing in the wake of the Seven Years’ War and the American Revolutionary
War, Bentham argued in the 1780s that the most fundamental precondition for global
peace was that all states must emancipate their colonies. At this point, Bentham, unlike
Vattel, conceived of the international realm as a space of empires and saw imperial
290 International Relations 31(3)

ambitions and imperial violence as the greatest threats to international peace. (As I noted
above, many of his French and British contemporaries shared this imperial frame, as is
evident from the centrality of European imperial expansion to some of the most influen-
tial works of the 1770s and 1780s such as Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, or Raynal
and Diderot’s Histoire des Deux Indes, though Bentham was writing in a more overtly
legal idiom.) His early writings on international law depict the international politics of
his era as dominated by the effects of colonial expansion. Colonization was, in Bentham’s
words, the ‘race of vulgar ambition’ and a ‘war against mankind’.42 Above all, he saw
colonies as the chief cause of war in the modern world. He cited as recent examples the
war against Spain in the 1740s (the War of Jenkins’ Ear), and the Seven Years’ War,
whose violence, he said, stretched from ‘North America to the East Indies’, and which,
in the needless destruction it caused Britain, demonstrated ‘the extreme folly, the mad-
ness of war’. Bentham saw a global system dominated by empires as structurally doomed
to incessant violence. Colonies provoked wars not only by multiplying the possible
sources of conflict but also because in their newness, and distance from Europe, they
were fraught with uncertainty, which Bentham saw as a key source of instability and
aggression. His project for the codification of international law was driven by the aim of
quelling conflict by reducing uncertainty. A code would do so, he thought, in part by
minimizing the many offenses against international peace that were committed by sover-
eigns unsure of, or in good-faith disagreement about, what constituted their obligations
toward one another. But the greater danger to peaceful commerce and cooperation was
empire. Bentham’s attention to the imperial nature of the world’s major powers allowed
him to see, and to make explicit, what remains possibly implicit, but certainly obscure in
Vattel: that a legal system premised on the reciprocity and equality of independent states
should require first of all that they give up their empires and become, in fact, the territori-
ally compact political communities that Vattel had hypothesized.
When Bentham returned to the project of codifying international law in the late 1820s,
his vision of the international realm had in important respects moved closer to Vattel’s (if
perhaps unwittingly, given his disdain for Vattel’s theory as ‘old-womanish and tauto-
logical’).43 In the notes on international law that he sent to the barrister and former colo-
nial judge Jabez Henry, in the hope that Henry would develop them into a treatise or
code, Bentham accepted a number of the essential features of Vattel’s picture of the
international realm: states must recognize each other as equals; each pledges to respect
the regime, religion, and customs of all the others; and each is oriented not only toward
keeping peace with the others but also toward ‘mutual good will’ and ‘mutual good
offices’. But Bentham now limited the community of states under international law to
‘all civilized nations[,] which at present is as much as to say, all nations professing the
Christian Religion’.44 This was a radical departure from both Vattel’s and his own earlier
presumptive universalism. Bentham was now also far more modest in his aspirations for
the code than he had been. Above all, he gave up the hope of taming imperial ambitions.
In describing the ‘Utility of a body of International law’, he first noted the ‘Good which
it is not capable of effecting – preventing a Sovereign who has purposes for conquest
from endeavouring to carry them into effect’.45 Rather, the code’s main function would
be to reduce uncertainty about states’ respective rights and duties, so that inflated ideas
of ‘rights violated’ might be kept from ‘stir[ring] up angry passions and anti-social
Pitts 291

affections’. Along with this greater modesty went a complete abdication of Bentham’s
original prescription for international peace, the emancipation of all colonies. Instead,
the principle of universal equality now required (just as Chitty did) that states not inter-
fere in one another’s colonies, or as Bentham put it,

Fundamental principles to be agreed upon by all the States: (1) universal equality. No State to
pretend to any authority over any other State (a) on sea, (b) on land in the territory of a barbarous
nation not being a member of the Congress. (2) All States to be upon a par in Congress,
whatsoever the form of government.46

Bentham, then, made a complete about-face on international law and empire. He gave
up on the key prescription for global peace that he had made as a young man, he accepted
the restriction of the international legal community to Christian Europe, and he accepted
that the system’s major powers would be vast global empires with utter legal impunity
– at least with respect to international law – in their conduct in their colonies. For help in
turning this sketch into a code of international law, he turned to a man whose reputation
was built on his work as a colonial official. Bentham’s motivations can be obscure, and
it is hard to account for what may have happened within his own mind from the 1780s to
the 1820s to bring about this change. (It may have had partly to do with the shift of the
center of gravity of imperial domains from the settler colonies of the Americas – which
had mostly established their independence by the late 1820s – to India and other non-
white populations. But it is worth stressing that in the earlier period Bentham insisted on
the emancipation of all colonies, India specifically included, and not just colonies whose
loudest voices were those of white settlers.)
Whatever his own reasons, there is no question that the change in Bentham’s thinking
tracks a more general development in European thinking in this period, one that we also
see in the shift from Vattel’s original text to the Chitty edition of the 1830s. We begin
with a universalist account of an international community that is not limited to Europe,
that is made up of states understood as moral communities protected by political auton-
omy to work out their collective life. We end with a vision of an international community
of equal states limited for the time being to Europe; states understood in a dual way as
legal equals vis-à-vis each other but also as global empires controlling vast territories and
populations as they see fit. International law speaks, in this model, only to the interac-
tions between European states; it is not equipped to analyze those states as empires, to
hold them to legal account, or to recognize the global order as one that is structured
hierarchically.

Conclusion
We inhabit a world that is in an important respect like Vattel’s, in which the dominant
image of the international realm as that of a formally egalitarian world of nation-states
exists alongside hierarchical structures of power that are difficult to recognize in the
terms provided by the conceptual model. We must acknowledge imperial and quasi-
imperial hierarchies – not just asymmetries of wealth and military power but also persis-
tent legal hierarchies and burdens – in order to analyze and respond to them. If it has
292 International Relations 31(3)

become commonplace to observe that the boundary between domestic and international
politics is far less stable than the model of ‘international’ relations would imply, the lens
of empire extends this insight into a host of connected formations, historical and contem-
porary. Patterns of domination that transcend international boundaries include settler
colonialism and slavery, fundamental aspects of the European imperial project inextrica-
ble from more manifestly ‘international’ phenomena.47 Since the nineteenth century,
these have been consistently racialized patterns, since, as Antony Anghie has written,
‘Race, transmuted into the more comprehensive notion of “civilization,” is central to the
very definition of international law’.48 Unequal international standing has routinely been
the fate of non-white states, from the ‘burdened’ membership of states such as Ethiopia
and Liberia in the League of Nations, to the constraints on sovereign prerogatives
imposed on postcolonial states, from contracts with multinational corporations to control
over natural resources. Ostensibly ‘domestic’ forms of racial subjugation and hierarchy
are continuous with ‘international’ ones, as many twentieth-century theorists and politi-
cal actors of the Black Atlantic (W.E.B. Du Bois, Franz Fanon, Marcus Garvey, Kwame
Nkrumah, and Julius Nyrere) insisted.49 Like the early Bentham, those theorists were
alert to the ways imperialism proliferates international conflict and violence. As Du Bois
wrote in 1917, when many Europeans were imagining the First World War as an unprec-
edented and almost inexplicable eruption of irrational violence,

As we see the dead dimly through rifts of battle smoke and hear faintly the cursing and
accusations of blood brothers, we darker men say: This is not Europe gone mad; this is not
aberration nor insanity; this is Europe; this seeming terrible is the real soul of white culture.

As long, he warned, as ‘the despising and robbery of darker peoples sits enthroned
even in the souls of those who cry peace, this is not the end of world war – it is the
beginning’.50 Race, though the subject of outstanding new work in IR and the history
of international thought, remains marginal to the mainstream of a discipline ‘predi-
cated on a systematic politics of forgetting, a willful amnesia, on the question of race’,
even as recent scholarship such as the work of Robert Vitalis and John Hobson has
shown the extent to which racial theory and the question of relations between racial-
ized dominant and subjugated communities were in fact central to the self-understand-
ing of mainstream IR in the early twentieth century.51
The history of international law, a history of universalism and hierarchy intertwined,
represents an important space for the work of conceptualizing, and gaining critical pur-
chase on, hierarchy in the international sphere: because of the long-standing role law
played in structuring and justifying hierarchy, and, as I have argued here, in occluding it,
and also because international law has always also offered resources for critique and a
framework for envisioning greater justice and equity. The discipline of IR has been less
hospitable to the overt normativity that is essential to international law’s identity, though
normative commitments are arguably often presupposed even if not acknowledged in IR
scholarship. But developments in contextual history may be instructive here. If some
contextualists once worried that presentism compromised the integrity of historical
scholarship, it is now clear not only that historians’ questions are invariably shaped by
the concerns of their own moment, but also that self-consciousness about one’s own
Pitts 293

contemporary political and conceptual ‘problem-space’ can greatly enhance a scholar’s

ability to do justice to the distinctive intellectual worlds of past moments.52 Similarly,
and alongside such historical self-consciousness, empirical and theoretical work in IR
could gain clarity from a greater willingness to avow normative commitments.

Acknowledgements
Versions of this article were presented at Princeton University, the University of Virginia, the
University of Chicago, and the conference ‘History, Politics, Law: thinking through the interna-
tional’, at the University of Cambridge, organized by Annabel Brett and Martti Koskenniemi; I
am grateful for their insightful feedback to those audiences and to William Bain, Duncan Bell,
Austin Carson, Adom Getachew, Lisa Wedeen, and three anonymous reviewers for International
Relations.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.

Notes
1. David Armitage, ‘The Fifty Years’ Rift: Intellectual History and International Relations’,
Modern Intellectual History, 1(1), 2004, pp. 97–109; also see Duncan Bell, ‘International
Relations: The Dawn of a Historiographical Turn’, British Journal of Politics and International
Relations, 3(1), 2001, pp. 115–26; Brian C. Schmidt, ‘Together Again: Reuniting Political
Theory and International Relations Theory’, British Journal of Politics and International
Relations, 4(1), 2002, pp. 115–40.
2. See, for example, David Armitage, Foundations of Modern International Thought (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2013); Edward Keene, Beyond the Anarchical Society: Grotius,
Colonialism, and Order in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002);
Edward Keene, International Political Thought: A Historical Introduction (Malden, MA:
Policy Press, 2005); Noel Malcolm, ‘Hobbes’s Theory of International Relations’, in Noel
Malcolm (ed.), Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 432–456;
Georg Cavallar, The Rights of Strangers: Theories of International Hospitality, the Global
Community, and Political Justice since Vitoria (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002).
3. David Armstrong, Theo Farrell, Hélène Lambert, International Law and International
Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Michael Byers (ed.), The Role
of Law in International Politics: Essays in International Relations and International Law
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Adriana Sinclair, International Relations Theory
and International Law: A Critical Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
4. Martti Koskenniemi narrates the history of the two disciplines’ gradual separation as claims
to realism came to be central to the identity of IR after the Second World War; earlier in
the century, law had dominated the study of International Relations in US colleges and uni-
versities, where 78 percent of the courses covered international law and 18 percent diplo-
matic history; Martti Koskenniemi, ‘Law, Teleology and International Relations: An Essay
294 International Relations 31(3)

in Counterdisciplinarity’, International Relations, 26(1), 2011, pp. 3–34, citing Ronald

Rogowski, ‘International Politics: The Past as Science’, International Studies Quarterly, 12,
1968, p. 398n10.
5. Antony Anghie, ‘Decolonizing the Concept of Good Governance’, in Branwen Gruffydd
Jones (ed.), Decolonizing International Relations (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield,
2006), p. 109; John M. Hobson, The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2012).
6. For example, Barbara Koremenos, Charles Lipson and Duncan Snidal (eds.), The Rational
Design of International Institutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
7. Martti Koskenniemi, Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law
1870–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Antony Anghie, Imperialism,
Sovereignty and the Making of International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2004); Anne Orford, Reading Humanitarian Intervention: Human Rights and the
Use of Force in International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Anne
Orford, International Authority and the Responsibility to Protect (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2011); Anne Orford (ed.), International Law and Its Others (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006); Teemu Ruskola, Legal Orientalism: China, the United
States, and Modern Law (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013); Arnulf Becker
Lorca, Mestizo International Law: A Global Intellectual History 1842–1933 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2014).
8. A recent instance of such a narrative can be found in Stephen Neff, Justice among Nations:
A History of International Law (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), who
argues that these principles ‘would, eventually, determine that international law would be a
product not of China but of Europe’ (p. 49). For discussion, see Jennifer Pitts, ‘The Critical
History of International Law’, Political Theory, 43(4), 2015, pp. 541–52. Earlier histories
include François Laurent, Histoire du droit des gens et des relations internationales (Gand: L.
Hebbelynck, 1850–1870), 18 vols; Arthur Nussbaum, A Concise History of the Law of Nations
(New York: Macmillan, 1947); Jan Hendrik Willem Verzijl, ‘Western European Influence on
the Foundations of International Law’, International Relations, 1(4), 1955, pp. 137–46.
9. Benno Teschke, The Myth of 1648: Class, Geopolitics, and the Making of Modern International
Relations (London: Verso, 2003); Andreas Osiander, ‘Sovereignty, International Relations,
and the Westphalian Myth’, International Organization, 55(2), 2001, pp. 251–87; Sebastian
Schmidt, ‘To Order the Minds of Scholars: The Discourse of the Peace of Westphalia in
International Relations Literature’, International Studies Quarterly, 55(3), 2011, pp. 601–23;
in his classic Concise History, Arthur Nussbaum criticized earlier historians such as Henry
Wheaton for considering the Peace of Westphalia ‘the inception of the European law of
nations’ (p. 86).
10. Tarak Barkawi, ‘Empire and Order in International Relations and Security Studies’, in Robert
A. Denemark (ed.), The International Studies Encyclopedia (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell,
2010), pp. 1360–79.
11. See, classically, Hedley Bull and Adam Watson (eds.), The Expansion of International
Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984); also Robert H. Jackson, Quasi-States: Sovereignty,
International Relations, and the Third World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
For critiques, see Branwen Gruffydd Jones, ‘Introduction’, in Decolonizing International
Relations, p. 4; John M. Hobson and Joelle C. Sharman, ‘The Enduring Place of Hierarchy
in World Politics: Tracing the Social Logics of Hierarchy and Political Change’, European
Journal of International Relations, 11(1), 2005, pp. 63–98.
12. Hobson, The Eurocentric Conception; Srdjan Vucetic, The Anglosphere: A Genealogy of
a Racialized Identity in International Relations (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
Pitts 295

2011); Duncan Bell, Reordering the World: Essays on Liberalism and Empire (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2016); Jeanne Morefield, Covenants without Swords (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); Jeanne Morefield, Empires without Imperialism
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Andrew Fitzmaurice, Sovereignty, Property and
Empire, 1500–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014) Robert Vitalis, White
World Order, Black Power Politics: the Birth of American International Relations (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 2015). Vitalis writes of himself that he teaches ‘in a department that
does not recognize what I do as IR’; Robert Vitalis, Introduction, ‘White World Order, Black
Power Politics: A Symposium’, The Disorder of Things, 6 June 2016, available at: https://
thedisorderofthings.com/2016/06/06/white-world-order-black-power-politics-a-symposium/.
13. Barkawi stresses the ramifications of colonial or ‘small wars’ for domestic politics and civil–
military relations of such conflicts as the Vietnam War for the United States and the Algerian
War for France in ‘States, armies, and empires’, in Legacies of Empire: Imperial Roots of the
Contemporary Global Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). On the con-
tribution of New World conquest to European economic growth and military and industrial
dominance, see Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: Europe, China, and the Making
of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).
14. Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty, p. 193; and see Lauren Benton and Lisa Ford, Rage for
Order: The British Empire and the Origins of International Law 1800–1850 (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2016).
15. Barry Buzan and George Lawson, The Global Transformation: History, Modernity, and the
Making of International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); David
Long and Brian Schmidt (eds.), Imperialism and Internationalism in the Discipline of
International Relations (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2005); Philip Darby (ed.), At the Edge of
International Relations: Postcolonialism, Gender and Dependency (London: Pinter, 1997);
L.H.M. Ling, Postcolonial International Relations: Conquest and Desire between Asia and
the West (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002); Jones, Decolonizing International Relations; Robbie
Shilliam (ed.), International Relations and Non-Western Thought (London: Routledge,
2010). On patterns of legal hierarchy stemming to the nineteenth century, see Gerry Simpson,
Great Powers and Outlaw States: Unequal Sovereigns in the International Legal Order
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); on race, Marilyn Lake and David Reynolds,
Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge
of Racial Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Alexander Anievas,
Nivi Manchanda, and Robbie Shilliam (eds.), Race and Racism in International Relations:
Confronting the Global Colour Line (New York: Routledge, 2015).
16. Richard Devetak, ‘Historiographical Foundations of Modern International Thought: Histories
of the European States-System from Florence to Göttingen’, History of European Ideas,
41(1), 2015, pp. 62–77.
17. For a recent argument for the first, see Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual: The Origins
of Western Liberalism (London: Allen Lane, 2014); Montesquieu and Mill among others
argued the third. And see Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Abstract of Monsieur the Abbé de Saint-
Pierre’s Plan for Perpetual Peace, which argues that Europe shared a culture based on Roman
law and that its geography of mountains and rivers meant that ‘the political order of this Part
of the world is, in certain regards, Nature’s work’; Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Plan for
Perpetual Peace, On the Government of Poland, and Other Writings on History and Politics,
(ed Christopher Kelly, Hanover: Dartmouth College Press, 2005), p. 33.
18. Montesquieu, L’esprit des lois; in Oeuvres Complètes, ed. Roger Caillois (Paris: Gallimard,
1951), vol. 2, cited by book and chapter (III,10), translation from Anne Cohler, Basia Miller
and Harold Stone (eds.), The Spirit of the Laws (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
296 International Relations 31(3)

1989), p. 29; and see Céline Spector, ‘Montesquieu, L’Europe, et les nouvelles figures de
l’Empire’, Revue Montesquieu, 8, 2006, pp. 17–42.
19. Montesquieu, De l’esprit des lois (V,14), The Spirit of the Laws, p. 60.
20. On the mid-nineteenth-century British preoccupation with the idea that the Chinese character
yi meant barbarian and was an insult that could not be tolerated in any treaty (when earlier
British dictionaries had translated the term neutrally as foreigner), see Lydia Liu, The Clash
of Empires: The Invention of China in Modern World Making (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2004), pp. 86–107.
21. Bentham introduced the term ‘international law’ to the public in 1789 in his Introduction to
the Principles of Morals and Legislation, noting its novelty, but first used it in earlier notes;
‘Projet Matière: Entregens’, Bentham Papers, University College London XXV.1. And see
M.W. Janis, ‘Jeremy Bentham and the Fashioning of “International Law”’, American Journal
of International Law, 78(2), 1984, pp. 405–18; and David Armitage, ‘Globalising Jeremy
Bentham’, in Foundations of Modern International Thought, pp. 172–87.
22. Heinrich Ludwig von Ompteda, Literatur des gesammten sowohl natürlichen als positiven
Völkerrechts (Regensburg: Montag, 1785); Robert Ward, An Inquiry into the Foundations
and History of the Law of Nations in Europe (London: A. Strahan, 1795).
23. Keene, Beyond the Anarchical Society, pp. 19–29.
24. ‘Les Nations, ou Etats sont des corps politiques de sociétés d’hommes unis ensemble pour
procurer leur salut & leur avantage, à forces réunies’; Emer de Vattel, Droit des gens (Leiden:
Aux depens de la Compagnie, 1758), vol. 1, p. 1; see Béla Kapossy and Richard Whatmore
(eds.), The Law of Nations (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2008), pp. 9–20. Unless other-
wise noted, I cite from this edition, which uses an anonymous eighteenth-century transla-
tion (London, 1797); also see Ben Holland, ‘The Moral Person of the State: Emer de Vattel
and the Foundations of International Legal Order’, History of European Ideas, 37, 2011, pp.
438–45; and for discussion of the emergence of an elision between nation and state in late-
eighteenth-century French thought (though without reference to Vattel), see Istvan Hont, ‘The
Permanent Crisis of a Divided Mankind’, in Jealousy of Trade: International Competition
and the Nation-State in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2005), pp. 447–528.
25. Emer de Vattel, The Law of Nations, 4.6.§78, p. 694; and see Preliminaries §18, p. 75.
26. Edmund Burke, ‘Speech in Reply’ [Warren Hastings Impeachment Proceedings], 30 May
1794, volume 7 of Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke [WSEB], P.J. Marshall (ed.)
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 290–2; ‘Motion for an Inquiry into the Seizure,
etc., of Private Property in St. Eustatius, 14 May 1781’, in The Speeches of the Rt. Hon.
Edmund Burke (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1816), vol. 2, pp. 256–7.
27. C.H. Alexandrowicz, ‘The New States and International Law’, Millennium, 3(3), 1974, pp.
226–33; and see C.H. Alexandrowicz, The Law of Nations in Global History, David Armitage
and Jennifer Pitts (eds.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).
28. Vattel largely disregarded the violence of European commercial and imperial expansion and
instead more consistently singled out various Muslim rulers who, though he did not exclude
them from the domain of the law of nations, he frequently depicted as knowingly violating its
provisions; see, for example, II.17.§273.
29. Stephen Krasner has often noted that the ‘Westphalian sovereign state model’ has little to do
with the Peace of Westphalia and owes far more to Vattel; see, for example, ‘Rethinking the
sovereign state model’, in Michael Cox, Tim Dunne, and Ken Booth (eds.) Empires, Systems
and States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 17–43. His argument that
the model is a ‘cognitive script characterized by organized hypocrisy’ stresses that states rou-
tinely, indeed ‘irresistibl[y]’, violate its norms, but he does not treat that hypocrisy as masking
Pitts 297

an imperial global order. His Structural Conflict: The Third World against Global Liberalism
(Berkeley, CA and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1985), though, does sug-
gest such a view.
30. See André Bandelier, ‘De Berlin à Neuchâtel: La Genèse du Droit des Gens d’Emer de Vattel’,
in Martin Fontius and Helmut Holzhey (eds.) Schweizer im Berlin des 18. Jahrhunderts
(Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1996), pp. 45–56; Tetsuya Toyoda, Theory and Politics of the Law
of Nations: Political Bias in International Law Discourse of Seven German Court Councilors
in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff, 2011).
31. Note the inconclusive evidence of the series of volumes attributed to Vattel as a co-editor,
called the Mémoires pour server à l’histoire de notre tems, par l’Observateur hollandois,
rédigez et augmentez par M.D.V. (Frankfort and Leipzig: Aux Dépens de la Compagnie,
1757–1758); these address both the American and the Asian theaters of the war in a way that
might suggest greater attention to the war’s extra-European facets than the Droit des gens
implies.
32. See C.G. Fenwick, ‘The Authority of Vattel, Part I’, American Political Science Review, 7,
1913, p. 395; Emmanuelle Jouannet, Emer de Vattel et l’émergence doctrinale du droit inter-
national classique (Paris: Pedone, 1998), pp. 14–15; F.S. Ruddy, ‘The Acceptance of Vattel’,
in C.H. Alexandrowicz (ed.) Grotian Society Papers 1972 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff,
1972); Hunter, ‘“A Jus gentium for America”: The Rules of War and the Rule of Law in the
Revolutionary United States’, Journal of the History of International Law, 14, 2012, pp.
173–206; Mark Hickford, ‘“Decidedly the Most Interesting Savages”: An Approach to the
Intellectual History of Maori Property Rights, 1837–53’, History of Political Thought, 27,
2006, pp. 122–67 at 123–33.
33. Chitty took Vattel’s key principle that a nation is charged with its own self-perfection, so
other states may not interfere in its affairs, to mean that states may not recognize another
state’s rebelling colonies, because that would constitute undue interference in a state’s inter-
nal affairs, straining that principle to the breaking point. Vattel, The Law of Nations, Joseph
Chitty (ed.) (London: S. Sweet, 1834), pp. 141–42.
34. Captain T.H. Bullock, The Chinese vindicated, or another view of the Opium Question,
being in Reply to a Pamphlet by Samuel Warren, Esq. Barrister at Law in the Middle Temple
(London: Allen & Co., 1840), p. 65.
35. Vattel, Law of Nations, I.8§90, p. 133; this was one of the passages Chinese Commissioner
Lin Zexu had translated (see below).
36. ‘If a state … insulates itself by its institutions, and adopts a system of policy that is plainly
inconsistent with the interests of every other nation, it appears to us that such nation may
be justly compelled to adopt a course of policy more consistent with the general well-being
of mankind’; ‘Opium’, A Supplement to Mr. McCulloch’s Commercial Dictionary (London:
Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1842), p. 72.
37. John Quincy Adams, ‘Lecture on the War with China, delivered before the Massachusetts
Historical Society, December, 1841’, Chinese Repository, 11, 1842, pp. 274–89 at 281.
38. See Chang Hsi-t’ung, ‘The Earliest Phase of the Introduction of Western Political Science
into China’, Yenching Journal of Social Studies, 5(1), pp. 1–30 at 10–15; Immanuel C.Y.
Hsü, China’s Entrance into the Family of Nations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1960), pp. 123–5; Lydia Liu, The Clash of Empires: The Invention of China in Modern
World Making (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 118. Liu argues that
‘Lin’s use of international law in these transactions was strategic’, on the grounds that he
had selectively translated passages ‘strictly confined to the issues of how nations go to war
and impose embargoes, blockades, and other hostile measures’ rather than taking the text as
a whole; Lydia Liu, ‘Legislating the Universal: The Circulation of International Law in the
298 International Relations 31(3)

Nineteenth Century’, in Lydia Liu (ed.) Tokens of Exchange: The Problem of Translation in
Global Circulations (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), pp. 127–64 at 141. But
this is to mark too stark a boundary between opportunism and simple willingness to engage
sources the British themselves considered authoritative, on a subject on which Lin considered
himself in the right and on which Vattel unambiguously supported his position.
39. Wei Yuan, Hai Guo Tu Zhi [Illustrated Records of the Oversea Countries] (Shaoyang, China:
Gu wei tang, Qing Xianfeng 2 [1852]); see the tendentious translation of the work’s preface
in John F. Davis, China during the War and since the Peace (London, 1852); and see Chang
Hsi-t’ung, ‘The Earliest Phase’.
40. Henry Wheaton, Elements of International Law, 6th ed. (Boston, MA: Little Brown, 1855),
p. 21. Compare Wheaton, Elements of International Law: With a Sketch of the History of the
Science, 2 vols. (London: B. Fellowes, 1836, 1st ed.), pp. 3–5 and 51–3, where he describes
the mutual influence of the public law of Europe and that of the ‘Mohammedans’ in ‘Turkey
and the Barbary states’.
41. Travers Twiss, The Law of Nations Considered as Independent Political Communities
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1884), ‘Preface to the Second Edition’, p. 5. On the profession-
alization of the discipline, see Koskenniemi, Gentle Civilizer; Casper Sylvest, ‘International
Law in Nineteenth-Century Britain’, in Casper Sylvest (ed.), British Yearbook of International
Law 2004 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 9–70.
42. ‘Emancipate your colonies!’ (1793), in John Bowring (ed.), The Works of Jeremy Bentham
(Edinburgh: W. Tait, 1838–43), vol. 4, pp. 408 and 416.
43. John Bowring (ed.), The Works of Jeremy Bentham, vol. 10 (Edinburgh: William Tait, 1843),
p. 584.
44. Jeremy Bentham, ‘International Law’, 11 June 1827, British Library, Add MSS 30151, ff. 13
and 15b.
45. Bentham, ‘International Law’, f. 15b.
46. Bentham, ‘International Law’, f. 17.
47. James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-
World, 1783–1939 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
48. Anghie, ‘Decolonizing the Concept of Good Governance’, p. 110.
49. See Adom Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, forthcoming); Siba N’Zatioula Grovogui,
Sovereigns, Quasi Sovereigns, and Africans: Race and Self-Determination in International
Law (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); Anghie, Imperialism,
Sovereignty.
50. W.E. Burghardt Du Bois, ‘Of the Culture of White Folk’, The Journal of Race Development,
7(4), 1917, pp. 437, 445.
51. Sankaran Krishna, ‘Race, Amnesia, and the Education of International Relations’, in Gruffydd
Jones (ed.), Decolonizing International Relations, p. 89; and see Lake and Reynolds, Drawing
the Global Colour Line.
52. David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), pp. 1–22.

Author biography
Jennifer Pitts is an associate professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. She is edi-
tor, with David Armitage, of The Law of Nations in Global History (Oxford University Press,
2017), and her book Boundaries of the International: Law and Empire, which explores European
debates over legal relations with extra-European societies during the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, is forthcoming from Harvard University Press.