Chapter 5 investigates the Indian government’s anomalous accession to “paramountcy,” which led it to pursue the territorial annexation of princely states. Controversially, this process often necessitated the violation of Britain’s celebrated “rule of law” and brought the nation’s reputation for fair play into question. Seeking to check this expansionism, reformers amalgamated classical law of nations theories with the findings of contemporary international law treatises to defend the rights of native rulers in Awadh, Tanjore, the Carnatic, and Mysore. If India’s princely states were protected, reformers anticipated that their sovereigns would internalize constitutionalist values and provide employment for educated Indians who struggled to find positions in the exclusive colonial bureaucracy.

This chapter examines the development of the just war idea in Christian thought from its beginnings through its taking classic shape until the early modern period, when it became the basis for the idea of the law of nations while also remaining as a religious concept in both Catholic and Protestant thought.

Chapter 5 shows that the claim that the Greek Bavarian-led state was undermining the formation of the nation was further radicalised when scholars, and in particular Nikolaos Saripolos, took on international law and addressed directly the curtailed sovereignty that the Great Powers had imposed on Greece. The chapter argues that if we want to understand the Greek discussions on international law, we need to consider two things: first, the place of the Greek kingdom within the regional legal order that had been formed in the Eastern Mediterranean since the 1830s; and second, the ways in which from the late 1840s onwards (and especially during the Crimean War) this order was being redefined by European powers and in particular by Great Britain. In this context, a number of interventions in the domestic affairs of the state by the guarantor powers made people like Saripolos realise that the fictions on which the international position of Greece was based had to be revised. They also led to claims that the monarchical policies were jeopardising the already precarious place of Greece in the geography of civilisation, and possibly its very political existence.

This chapter gives an account of Pufendorf’s discussion and use of the law of nations. It first outlines his distinctive contribution to contemporary discussions of the topic, namely his rejection rejection, against Grotius, of a specific “positive” law of nations distinct from the law of nature. Secondly it explains how this position relied on Pufendorf’s voluntarist conception of law as the command of a superior and on his conception of the state of nature as devoid of such superiors. The law of nations was simply the law of nature applied to states as composite persons in the state of nature, and the treaties and alliances concluded between them could not amount to a separate and obligatory law of nations. Thirdly, against this background, the chapter shows how Pufendorf discussed the law of war, disentangling the perfect and imperfect obligations of the law of nations from custom, civil laws, and pacts and agreements. Finally, the chapter analyses Pufendorf’s own casuistic use of the law of nations in the various polemical works he published in the service of his sovereigns, especially the King of Sweden, often in line with the theoretical position he developed but also departing from it when opportune.

Grotius' two major treatises on the law of nations - De jure praedae and De jure belli ac pacis - both had the discussion of the just war doctrine as the backbone to their structure and argument. Whereas the older treatise was construed to argue the justice and legality of the taking of a Portuguese ship in East Indian waters, the more mature work aimed at a systematic exposition of the laws regulating the starting, waging and ending of war. Grotius offered a novel reading of the just war doctrine by rewriting it into the key of his general legal theory and his doctrine of natural rights as subjective rights under commutative justice. This chapter analyses Grotius' reframing o the just war doctrine and his re-systematisation of late-medieval and Renaissance legacies of theologians, canonists and civilians into a new doctrine of jus ad bellum, also giving some attention to its effect for the legal process of peace-making.

Grotius lived through a time of great upheaval in Europe as well as in his country of birth, the Dutch Republic. The religious, political and constitutional convulsions that struck the Republic destroyed Grotius' career but also, in combination with fundamental changes in the intellectual outlook of early seventeenth-century Europe formed his views of God, nature, society, politics and law. This chapter introduces the extraordinary polymath Grotius was from the perspective of this background and offers a map to the five parts of this volume, and their respective chapters.

From the 16th century onwards, the German academy offered a home for the most intensive reflection about modern statehood. German professors used the vocabulary of ius naturae et gentium (law of nature and of nations) to adapt the insights they had applied to the constitution of the Roman–German Empire to the world of European diplomacy in general. Statehood, it was suggested, was an instrument for the community to govern its affairs in a rational way. The notion of the Christian paterfamilias was given a secular meaning in the theory of the ruler as the manager of the state-machine that was to be operated under the instructions produced by a rational science of natural law. The fact that the practice of 18th-century diplomacy was hard to confine within the strictures of natural law theory, gave legal doctrine an often sceptical tone that pushed it ever closer to raison d’état.

The Westphalian tradition of just war thinking rooted itself in a different understanding of natural law. Instead of understanding natural law as part of the divine law and reflecting humanity’s moral aspirations, the Westphalians’ natural law was rooted in the “state of nature” and reflected what reason and custom told us about humanity’s actual conduct. Justice, in this view, did not include liberality or charity; it involved the protection of the rights of sovereigns. International justice became equated with the rights of sovereign autonomy and reciprocal non-interference associated with the Treaties of Westphalia. The just war thinkers of this era are thus more hesitant to endorse a right of rebellion, intervention to support rebels, humanitarian intervention, war as punishment, war to defend the innocent, or war against those who commit crimes against nature. War is an instrument to defend international borders, not to enforce an abstract ideal of justice. This leads to the signature contribution from the Westphalian tradition: that the preservation of the balance of power is a just cause because it preserves the independence and territorial integrity of every state.

This chapter opens the first part of the book that presents the background of the First World War. It deals with the emergence of the concept of “enemy alien” in the debate among international lawyers. Starting with the Law of Nations published by Emer de Vattel in 1758, it analyzes and discusses what the foundational texts of international law in the century-and-a-half preceding the First World War said on the rights of foreigners in peacetime and on the conduct toward these same foreigners when they became enemies in wartime. It then compares legal doctrines and practices analyzing the behavior of belligerents towards enemy aliens in a string of interstate wars that occurred between the end of the eighteenth century and 1865, namely the French Revolutionary Wars of 1792–1793, the Napoleonic Wars, the War of 1812 between Britain and the United States, the Crimean War and the American Civil War. The chapter follows the changes in the attitude toward enemy aliens that mass conscription and the post-French Revolution concept of citizenship and nationality triggered.

Chapter 7 discusses the conceptual and historiographical implications of the analysis of consuls in Chapter 5 and of the jurisdictional practices of accumulation in Chapter 6. Exploring different meanings of jurisdiction for the doctrine of the law of nations in Castile and for England’s famous Calvin’s Case reveals the importance of the difference between transplants and transports of authority as shaped by different notions of dominium. In effect, transplants of authority refer to notions of dominium that incorporate both ownership of things and people and rule or judicial authority over things and people. In contrast, transports of authority refer to a more restricted notion of dominium focused on the ownership of things, or what some might identify as private property. Finally, in the Mediterranean, jurisdictional accumulation reveals how early modern consuls, as the most significant and neglected of jurisdictional actors, were shaping key legal fictions (political–economic and Christian–non-Christian) that were maintained in the later-nineteenth-century’s construction of modern international law, and which contributed to excluding peoples from the standards of civilisation.

Collective beliefs and the corresponding political organization influenced features of interstate relations such as the nature of warfare, alliance structure, and the absence of a hegemonic power. Except for Siam, the European colonial powers controlled every polity in Southeast Asia by the late nineteenth century. Siam adjusted to Western principles of political organization but did so against the backdrop of its existing belief system. Positivist international law nevertheless continued to exclude it from the Law of Nations, in a case similar to how the West treated the Islamic and East Asian polities.

Contrary to views that these non-Westphalian polities could not adjust to material and conceptual changes, fundamental transformations occurred throughout the non-European international societies.The encounter between the universalist empires and the Western polities introduced new perspectives of inclusion and exclusion and influenced both parties. Studying collective beliefs not only provides a means to examine different patterns of international order but also serves as a mirror to contemporary preconceptions of international relations. Imputing the Western nation-state as the normal pattern of political organization leads to a process of normation---the attempt to impose that form of political community on others. Historical reflection reveals that international relations hardly consist of immutable patterns of behavior. While material conditions play an important role, the modalities through which individuals and social groups understand these phenomena occur against the template of a shared collective consciousness. Collective beliefs form a critical component for explaining state policies and are themselves independent sources of power.

The Islamic empires, and specifically the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire, were not antithetical to the Westphalian principles of international order. The claim of Islamic and Ottoman incompatibility had more to do with European colonial ambitions. Altering their universalist claims, Ottoman rulers engaged in significant adjustments to Western principles of international diplomacy and international relations. Studying the Islamic world provides insights into how a regional order might be based on a shared collective identity rather than on material dominance by a hegemonic power. The Ottoman Empire provides a perfect case to examine adjustment at the peak of Western imperial expansion and confrontation with the West.

The culmination of the clash between two conceptions of infidel dominium and world order expressed itself most dramatically at the Valladolid junta of the Spanish imperial court. This debate put on perspicuous display two opposed ethics of evangelization embedded in the theology and canon law of the Latin West: an apostolic method of peaceful preaching and a coercive method of missionary war. Las Casas and Sepúlveda, respectively, took up these two approaches with startling results. Drawing on biblical and theological legal sources, both deployed natural law and the law of nations to advance their political arguments concerning Christian-infidel relations, thus signaling the ambivalent ideological tone of international relations in the West. Whereas Sepúlveda defended the justice of Spanish imperial dispossession of native peoples through war, Las Casas radically accounted for Amerindian claims of just war against European aggressors. By turning to Valladolid in depth, the unique scholastic theological and juristic contributions of Las Casas and the Spanish Dominicans appear with greater salience for international legal thought. Additionally, the understated ideological vestiges of Sepúlveda’s Spanish imperial humanism for early modern and modern European expansion also come into sharp relief.

In view of seventeenth-century Protestant humanist transformations, this concluding chapter returns to the Spanish Dominicans and their scholastic-juristic view on the law of nations as a normative resource for thinking about international society. Their Thomistic attention to the rationality of the universal law of nations as positive human law enabled political recognition of non-European polities, the lawful occupants of the Indies. This contrasted with an imperial-humanist jurisprudence that provincialized natural law and the law of nations under European civilizational hierarchy to justify dispossession of inferior peoples. The chapter especially charts the evolution of Las Casas’s thinking through his interaction with the theologians at Salamanca. His eclectic synthesis of Thomistic theology, canon law, Roman law, and humanism to buttress indigenous occupation exemplified a radical scholastic brand of legal humanism that complicates static ideological categories in the history of international legal thought. By placing Las Casas in conversation with his Dominican confreres, a normative view of the law of nations grounded in Christian theological convictions emerges. It accounts for the independence and interdependence of all peoples, and the indispensable role of justice and solidarity in promoting world order under a Christian ethic of loving one’s neighbors.