Smiley , Will From Slaves to Prisoners of War: The Ottoman Empire, Russia, and International Law (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 365 consideration is given to the ways in which the Pomors organized their activities, including the winter land-based hunting of fox, polar bear, northern reindeer and eider-duck. Altogether it is concluded that Pomor expeditions to Svalbard did not play a substantial role in the northern economy, though the sources available are two meagre to allow for a definitive judgement. The book’s second section consists of some 184 documents, most of which appear in published form for the first time. The authors and their assistants have scoured archives in Moscow (RGADA), St Petersburg (RGIA, Arkhiv SPbII RAN) and Archangel (GAAO) to make a wide range of materials available to the scholarly community. The documents include those relating to government attempts to establish monopoly companies according to mercantilist principles, and to develop a whaling industry, and those which cast light on traditional Pomor activities. An important role in the latter is played by data from the Archangel customs receipts. There are two appendices. The first is a list of excerpts from the St Petersburg vedomosti for the 1740s and ’50s with details about whaling activity plus a translation of an account of a voyage to Svalbard undertaken in 1780 by S. Bacstrom. The second contains data on the arrival and departure of relevant vessels at the port of Archangel with the provisions and imports carried (1780s) and other details. There is a short bibliography and indices of personal and geographical names, but unfortunately no subject index. In conclusion, this book can be said to be a very solid contribution to the literature concerning Russian maritime activity in Svalbard and its surrounding seas, and in the north more generally, in the eighteenth century. In addition it provides scholars with a major new resource for future research. All historical scholars with Russian Arctic interests will value its appearance. School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences Denis J. B. Shaw University of Birmingham Smiley, Will. From Slaves to Prisoners of War: The Ottoman Empire, Russia, and International Law. The History and Theory of International Law. Oxford, Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2018. x + 283 pp. Map. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £65.00. Narratives of captivity and slavery loom large in imperial Russia’s encounter with the Ottoman empire, evoking the Orientalist tropes that characterized broader European discourses about ‘the East’. These narratives also had material basis in the Russo-Ottoman confrontation, marked by internecine wars that resulted in large numbers of captives on both sides. In From Slaves to Prisoners of War: The Ottoman Empire, Russia, and International Law, Will SEER, 97, 2, APRIL 2019 366 Smiley places the shifting norms, governance and practice of captivity on the Russo-Ottoman frontier at the centre of a new account of international law’s development before the twentieth century. This account provincializes western Europe and the ‘Law of Nations’ doctrines articulated by Grotius or Vattel, and argues instead for a set of norms regarding subjecthood and the laws of war that emerged from the exigencies of inter-imperial competition on the ground. Beginning with Peter the Great’s attempts to puncture Ottoman control of the Sea of Azov in the early eighteenth century, and tracing RussoOttoman relations through to the eve of the First World War, Smiley presents a compelling genealogy of law wrought by war, and the implications of this process for subjects of the Tsar and Sultan. Over the course of ten chapters, Smiley presents a clear chronology of stepwise and contingent legal change. Ottoman approaches to captives (many of whom were also slaves) evolved from the ‘Law of Ransom’ in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, to the ‘Law of Release’ from the 1730s through to the mid-nineteenth century, and a prisoner-of-war system that began under the aegis of ‘benign reciprocity’ in the mid-nineteenth century. This transformation was, Smiley argues, ‘complex and multilayered’ (p. 237) and not characterized by a single direction of ideological travel from west to east. Crucially, the Ottoman captivity system, which by 1900 had come to resemble the norms expounded by international humanitarian law, was formed through contestation with Russia and then expanded to apply to Ottoman relations with other powers...