Chapter 4 - Boundaries of Victorian international law

Summary

INTRODUCTION: THE NEW CENTRALITY OF THE SCOPE OF INTERNATIONAL LAW

When John Stuart Mill wrote in 1859 that ‘[t]o characterize any conduct whatever towards a barbarous people as a violation of the law of nations, only shows that he who so speaks has never considered the subject’, he ignored, whether unwittingly, or more probably wilfully, a long history of legal and diplomatic relations with many non-European powers and of sophisticated philosophical and doctrinal inquiries into the universality or limits of the law of nations. Mill's Victorian contemporaries almost universally concurred in his judgement that very few, if any, non-European states could be considered equal subjects of international law, but they debated the scope of international law and the grounds for its boundaries with an urgency that belies Mill's self-assured dismissal of the very question.

The question of the geographic scope of the law of nations was central for theorists of international law throughout the second half of the nineteenth century in a way that it had not been to the thinkers they recognised as the founders of their field – Grotius, Pufendorf, Wolff, or Vattel, for instance. In this chapter, I explore the preoccupation among Victorian thinkers, both international lawyers and participants in a broader public debate, with the question of the scope of international law and the extent to which it could be thought to apply to non-European societies, especially Asian commercial states.