The Boundaries of Peace-Making: British Imperial Encounters, c. 1700–1900

Abstract

Many histories of peace settlements in international law have concentrated on the peace treaties of European powers inter se. Literature on the history and anthropology of imperial legal ordering, on the other hand, has illuminated the outer reaches of this picture: peaces made by European powers in the expansion of empire. This chapter draws these two bodies of work into relation, with a particular focus on British practice in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. The chapter poses anew some fundamental questions about the conceptual and juridical universe of ‘European’ peace-making: to what extent we can understand peace as a relation of law, and where we are to look for the law on peace? Opening up the implicit geographical and conceptual boundaries which characterize much legal scholarship on peace settlements both challenges our sense of the legal past, and offers new insights for thinking about peace-making and the lex pacificatoria in the present.

Keywords: peace treaty, peace-making, empire, lex pacificatoria, jus post bellum