The International History of (International) Sovereignty

Abstract

Historians have all but dispensed with a conventional chronology that marks the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) as the origin of a modern state-centric territorial sovereignty. Instead, they are accumulating evidence that, since at least the early nineteenth century, sovereignty stretches back to the imperial practice of intervention into polities elsewhere on humanitarian grounds. Imperial sovereignty was less uniform than imperial officials and cartographers asserted; instead, as Lauren Benton has argued, it was (and is) usually “more myth than reality, more a story that polities [told] about their own power than a definite quality that they possess[ed]”. Then there is the increasing number of historical examples of nonnormative, quasi-invisible forms of extra-territoriality that shaped the global imperial political architecture of the late nineteenth century: from the remaining principalities of the Holy Roman empire, and the conceptually distinctive practices of the Habsburgs as they separated cultural sovereignty from political sovereignty within their imperial territory, to the European claims to commercial and municipal authority in the treaty ports that dotted China’s seaboard and river system, carving out the spoils of war.