A Case Study of the Construction of International Hierarchy: British Treaty-Making Against the Slave Trade in the Early Nineteenth Century

Abstract

This article evaluates different theories of hierarchy in international relations through a case study of the treaty system that the British constructed in the early nineteenth century in an effort to abolish the slave trade. The treaty system was extraordinarily wide-ranging: it embraced European maritime powers, new republics in the Americas, Muslim rulers in northern and eastern Africa, and “Native Chiefs” on the western coast of Africa. It therefore allows for a comparative analysis of the various types of treaty that the British made, depending on the identity of their contracting partners. The article argues that a broadly constructivist approach provides the best explanation of why these variations emerged. Although British treaty-making was influenced by the relative strength or weakness of the states with which they were dealing, the decisive factor that shaped the treaty system was a new legal doctrine that had emerged in the late eighteenth century, which combined a positivist theory of the importance of treaties as a source of international law with a distinction between the “family of civilized nations” and “barbarous peoples.”Some of the arguments in this article were presented to a seminar at the University of Chicago, and I am grateful to members of the Political Science Department there for several valuable constructive criticisms. I would also like to thank Duncan Bell, Molly Cochran, Steve Hopgood, Andy Hurrell, Katja Weber, and the journal's two anonymous readers for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of the article.