Conclusion
Faith in the redeeming powers of free trade never convinced states to give up arms, not even states that accept that free trade creates wealth and reliably pacifies through interdependence.
Adam Smith, Silas Deane, Ezra Stiles' first draft, Madison and others who held a vision of well-balanced economic interÂdependences underpinning perpetual peace were proven wrong. At the same time, the economic element of state sovereignty continued to expand. From a right to taxation and a monopoly over issuing currency, it grew to cover indusÂtrial policy, the protection of trade routes, the right to use arms to decide whom to trade with as a neutral, in some cases even territorial dominion over the seas. Over the course of this expansion, especially during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, liberal states had to wrestle with the corporations that they created in the seventeenth century as engines of imperialism.[876] To a deÂgree, this follows the pattern we find in the dialectic between kings and aristocrats when the latter receive special powers to defend the realm's borders. Across cultures and ages we find weak kings who create barons, margraves, and similar ranks with extraordinary powers, often combining military, taxÂcollecting, judicial and executive functions, as a means and incentive to conÂquer territory or protect current holdings. As the state consolidates, central auÂthority and these ranks invariably clash. This is the pattern that the VQC and the East India Company reproduce for overseas expansion[877] [878] There are important differences, not least among them that the beginnings of English imperialism were tied more closely to the government than in the equivalent Dutch process. This is unsurprising, as the central authority in the newly created federal repubÂlic of the United Provinces did not have powers comparable to the English Crown and Parliament. However, the similarities are at least as striking as the differences; and both corroborate the thesis that the best way to understand this fundamental tension is through the Grotius-Selden debate, complete with the well-known disagreements and seldom noticed agreements between these towering figures in the history of international law, as well as with an account of the seeds of future conflict, notably the unresolved hierarchy of rights for states and corporations we find when we compare ιpc, Mare liberum, and ibp.There is some literature on how rival approaches to sovereignty and property as either separate or interrelated categories have historically afÂfected international law.99 What remains missing is the distinction between different understandings of international law that regard sovereignty as inÂseparable from property, but attribute widely different capacities to states, corporations and individuals for holding both or either. A historical critical approach to liberal imperialism and international law offers a powerful way to address the gap in current formulations of sovereignty. Though China proffers an explicit, and Russia and Saudi Arabia a less explicit alternative to the universalising combination of capitalism and liberalism, longue duree legal historiography reveals that to a remarkable degree both the structure and pursuit of international law have come to embody assumptions about the economic powers of states and economic components of sovereignty that few thinkers, if any, would have found obvious in the early seventeenth century.
In other words, the origins of modern international law are the opposite of what you probably think they are.[879] Most people in liberal, representative, and capitalist democracies, even recent skeptics of neoliberalism and the inÂvisible hand, tend to think that free trade does not only benefit everyone by optimising the production and distribution of goods, but that it also fosters peace by making nations interdependent; and the power of free trade to spread goods and norms around the world helps to liberate bodies and minds from want, oppression and narrow nationalism.
These things may be true, but as far as the origin of this system is concerned, everything points in the opposite diÂrection. The natural right to free trade was invented and used as a legal fiction of states that wished to trade globally but also to restrict the trade of others, in pursuit of their own interests. It is not free trade as such that characterises modernity, but the rhetoric of free trade, used to break into new markets, couÂpled with claims of territorial dominion over both land and the seas, to the exclusion of others.101 A world of capitalist, liberal democracies combines the rhetoric of free trade (both historically and necessarily) with ostensibly contraÂdictory practices of strategic trade restrictions and territorial claims over both land and seas. Among the many themes in the works of Grotius and Selden that can be profitably compared - such as Old Testament laws and internaÂtional law, scepticism, or early Christianity - their views and the reception of their views on trade, the economic powers of government, and the legitimising principle of popular sovereignty, shed new light on tensions in the heart of liberal imperialism.Acknowledgement
With many thanks to Hans Blom, Ioannis Evrigenis, Gaby Mahlberg, and parÂticipants at the Law and Empire in the Longue Duree conference for their comÂments, and to the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft for financial support.