Congress Panel: Treaty-making in Comparative Perspective

The publication of the volume Empire by Treaty, edited by Saliha Belmessous, in 2015, stimulated a renewed interest in the role of international treaties and treaty-making in the context of modern imperialism. Whereas the orthodox view, which emerged in the context of mid-twentieth century decolonisation, regarded treaties primarily as unequal instruments of Western imperialism, obtained largely by means of gunboat diplomacy, recent research in the fields of global history, new diplomatic history, and the history of international law has yielded a more nuanced and multi-facetted picture of the crucial role of treaties and treaty-making in colonial and imperial contexts. Researchers have for example highlighted how cross-cultural diplomatic encounters and personal relations influenced treaty-making processes, how Europeans tried to fit purportedly traditional practices of diplomacy and inter-polity relations into the international treaty-system, how non-European actors actively used treaties as a means of promoting their interests, how non-state actors frequently initiated treaty-making processes, and how individual treaties often were part of larger, long-term treaty-making projects promoted by leading international treaty parties. Other topics that have been explored include the sometimes flawed anthropological understanding of how treaties were understood by non-Europeans, the substantial differences in the existing versions in different languages of the treaties and their subsequent paper-trails, e.g. with regard to biases and misrepresentations in the published and digitized versions of the treaties that to this day provide the main sources for research in the field.

Ten years after the publication of Empire by Treaty, this panel takes stock of the current research in the field of treaties and treaty-making in imperial settings. It highlights some of the major research efforts currently underway on treaty-making in different parts of the world that were affected by European colonialism and imperialism.