This paper examines how Britain, through ‘gunboat diplomacy’ campaigns against so-called Arab pirates, overran the pre-existing Gulf suzerain system and became the predominant power in its waters. By filling a gap in the classical English School ‘international society’ expansion thesis, this article describes how and when political and ideational shifts in the Gulf allowed sovereignty to manifest into its present dynastic form. It argues British imposition of rules, norms, and institutions through a series of nineteenth-century Anglo-Arab treaties against Arab ‘pirates’ broke traditional conditions of divisible sheikhly authority to embed a new telos of sovereign indivisibility, facilitating indirect colonisation. Colonialism as an overlooked primary institution in the classical international society expansion story reinforced political inequality to create dynasticism to simplify colonial statecraft. The 1836 Restrictive Line was a central institution introduced by Britain to manage the transition from divisible to indivisible authority. Drawing from colonial archives, the paper argues that British control over cross-coastal movements through a Restrictive Line reinforced domestic sovereignty of British treaty signatories while weakening agency of maritime sheikhs outside the Anglo-Arab treaties framework. This unsettled traditional structures, transforming maritime tribal confederacies from participation to compliance and reconfiguring Gulf coastal security imperatives for treaty-signatory sheikhs from sea to desert.

This article discusses the concept of misrecognition to analyse international legal ordering in the practice of colonial treatymaking. As critical interventions to the debate on recognition have made clear, recognition is about exclusion as much as it is about inclusion. The most obvious example is the nineteenth-century applications of the standard of civilisation, where the European Family of Nations introduced the criterion of ‘civilisation’, which excluded non-European entities as sovereigns and legitimised their colonisation. But at the same time colonial treaties included the ‘savage rulers’ as signatory powers, and thus legal persons within the international legal order that at once excluded them. This contribution to the Special Issue discusses these treatymaking practices as a practice of misrecognition; not because it misrecognises some natural, essential, or true identity of the indigenous entities, but as a misrecognition of the international order’s own conditions of possibility through practices that simultaneously constitute that order and undermine its constitutive conditions. A rereading of Hegel’s famous master–slave metaphor through the concept of misrecognition sheds light on the reversals and contradictions of the colonial legal enterprise and reveals the aporia of the contemporary international legal order by showing the void at its heart.

From the ‘long’ sixteenth century the Ottoman regencies of North Africa operated as major centres of piracy and privateering across the Mediterranean Sea. Though deemed by emerging European powers to be an expression of the ‘barbarian’ status of Muslim and Ottoman rulers and peoples, piracy, and corsairing in fact played a major role in the development of the ‘primary’ or ‘master’ institutions of international society such as sovereignty, war, or international law. Far from representing a ‘barbarian’ challenge to the European ‘standard of civilization’, piracy and privateering in the modern Mediterranean acted as contradictory vehicles in the affirmation of that very standard.

This article explores how Barbary piracy, privateering, and corsairing acted as ‘derivative’ primary institutions of international society. Drawing on recent ‘revisionist’ accounts of the expansion of international society, it argues that piracy and corsairing simultaneously contributed to the construction of law and sovereignty across the Mediterranean littoral whilst also prompting successive wars and treaties aimed at outlawing such practices. The cumulative effect of these complex historical experiences indicates that primary institutions of international society owe much more to ‘barbarism’ and ‘illegality’, an indeed to international stratification uneven development, than is commonly acknowledged.