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A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400 – 1900

2011; Duke University Press; Volume: 91; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-1165433

1527-1900

Carla Rahn Phillips,

Colonialism, slavery, and trade

The governance of empires and the claims of rival European states to exercise sovereignty over disparate territories have long posed interpretive problems for historians. Traditionally, they tended to focus on the empire of one or another European state, though pioneering works concerned with the Age of Exploration as a whole had to take a more comparative approach. Not surprisingly, both the comparative and the single-empire approaches lent themselves to the mapping of global spaces, color-coded to delimit the claimed possessions of the empire or empires discussed.A key issue in the history of Europe’s global empire building was the contested nature of virtually all of the extra-European territories claimed, just as similar contentions and border disputes marked relations among states within Europe. No map can capture the complexity of those disputes any more than a current map of the United States with “red” and “blue” states can capture the full complexity of the political landscape. If we abandon the color-coded maps, how can we understand the global landscape in the age of European empires?Legal history at all levels of inquiry offers a promising approach, though hardly an easy one. The interpretive problems regarding European empires have become more complicated as historians have plumbed the archives, turning up legal cases involving disputed jurisdictions and multiple legal systems operative at the same time and in the same place. By tracking the legal arguments on all sides of those cases, historians have begun to recapture the sense of daunting complexity that marked the search for usable law and sovereignty in new and changing circumstances around the globe. By examining those cases and taking a fresh look at the arguments of pioneering theorists of international and maritime law, numerous scholars have reminded us of the centrality of the law and its uses in understanding the history of European empires. They have also reminded us of the sophistication and intellectual acuity of European bureaucrats, indigenous rulers, community leaders, and ordinary citizens in understanding and using legal systems. As a result, scholars have recognized the need to consider the points of view of non-European parties to jurisdictional and other legal disputes, and to examine the complicated history of shared or delegated sovereignty in non-European territories.Lauren Benton has read widely and deeply in the published work about European exploration and empire building, legal theory, community studies, political history, bureaucratic structure, and a host of other interrelated themes, listed in the bibliography. The footnotes contain not only her acknowledgment of intellectual debts but also her reasons for accepting or rejecting arguments in the published literature. Benton adds her own archival research to the source base, most notably from Spanish archives for material related to the Americas. In trying to make sense of the complicated legal landscape of all European empires in an extended period, she rejects the use of mapping and the concept of borderlands, which mask the blurred and contingent nature of the search for sovereignty. Instead, she analyzes corridors of claimed legal authority such as riverine regions and enclaves of authority such as fortresses or trading posts surrounded by local powers. Everywhere, Europeans had to work with “complex patterns of legal pluralism” (p. 38 n. 9a) even as they attempted to apply the legal system they carried with them — the “portability of subjecthood” (p. 286). Often, bureaucrats had to work out a functional relationship of “layered sovereignty” with local powers. Instead of looking for contrasts in how the various European powers approached these problems, Ben-ton focuses on continuities: all European states with pretentions to empire shared the dilemma of finding appropriate laws and making them function effectively in a diversity of circumstances.In six densely argued chapters, Benton considers riverine regions and other “corridors of control” and why charges of treason emerged so frequently in those venues; maritime law, piracy, and questions of sea control; islands and their relationship with convict transportation and military law; colonial enclaves and quasi-sovereignty (as in British India); and the lessons about the search for usable law and sovereignty in all of those venues. The overall argument is neatly summed up in the following passage: “The layering of overlapping, semi-sovereign authorities within empires generated a lumpy juridical order, in which legal actors, even rogues (pirates, as we have seen, or isolated and autocratic garrison commanders), engaged in creative legal posturing. They sought not merely to give their actions the color of law but also to render them secure parts of a recognized administrative order. Subjects did not consider themselves to be operating with a ‘special kind of law’ but rather, at most, to be producing logical variations in the law of the empire” (p. 290).The book should appeal to scholars interested in particular empires as well as global history. By exploding and recombining the standard categories and approaches, Benton forces us to take a fresh look at comparative history in general.