From the perspective of political theory, the history of international law may be seen as a significant and underexplored aspect of a broader phenomenon:

the involvement of moral universalism, and especially liberalism, in forms of domination in spite of and indeed partly because of universalist moral com­mitments, commitments that remain compelling and perhaps unavoidable even given their complicity with domination.

For historians of political thought, the law of nations is a vital if neglected discourse for this reckoning given its importance as a language and framework for political argument used broadly in public debates and by political thinkers, especially prior to the consolidation of international law as an academic discipline in the second half of the nineteenth century.⁵ The presence of

(eds.), Law and Politics in British Colonial Thought: Transpositions of Empire (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 11-29, and Anne Orford's defense of different approaches in history versus law: Orford, ‘The past as law or history?'; but also see Martti Koskenniemi, ‘Vitoria and Us: Thoughts on Critical Histories of International Law', Rechtsgeschichte 22 (2014), 119-35, criticizing contextual history as insufficiently critical.

³ Alexandra Kemmerer, ‘“We do not need to always look to Westphalia..A Conversation with Martti Koskenniemi and Anne Orford', Journal of the History of International Law 17 (2015), 1-14, at 5.

⁴ For elaborations of these last two points, see Jennifer Pitts, ‘The Critical History of International Law', Political Theory 43 (2015), 541-52; and ‘Political Theory of Empire and Imperialism', Annual Review of Political Science 13 (2010), 211-35.

⁵ Christopher Warren, Literature and the Law of Nations 1580-1680 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), argues that the significant presence of the law of nations in early-modern literature waned in the eighteenth century as the law of nations began to take on more concrete the droit des gens or law of nations in works for general audiences suggests the degree to which this was once a language of moral and political thought rather than a narrowly legal and academic doctrine.⁶

Of particular interest for political theory, I want to suggest here, are the images or figurations that legal theories create to make the world conceptually tractable, and to make normative claims about global interactions. In addition to serving as a powerful political discourse both in supplying justifications for the actions of imperial states and their agents and in furnishing resources for the criticism of abuses of power by imperial states - international law's ‘imperial' and ‘counter-imperial' dimensions⁷ - the law of nations and inter­national law have long done a third sort of work with respect to empire, which has been to efface the imperial aspect of European states and the hierarchical nature of the modern global order. As James Tully has argued, ‘the world legal and political order is best characterised as an imperial order of some kind', yet ‘our dominant languages of disclosure and research conceal and overlook the imperialism of the present'.⁸ As accounts of the law of nations came to be structured by a conception of nations as moral communities equal in status with, and independent of, one another, they had the effect of denying theoretical space for the consideration of European imperial actions. It is that third sort of work, what Tully calls disclosure and I have here called the politics of law's conceptual frames, that this chapter will explore through a reading of Vattel's Droit des gens (1758) and its reception in early-nineteenth- century British debates.

institutional and disciplinary forms such as specialized curricula, and as literature came to be more narrowly linked with imaginative writing (at 19—22).

⁶ In this less doctrinally precise usage, questions of the grounds, or legal nature, of the law of nations tend not to be addressed.

⁷ See Sundhya Pahuja, Decolonising International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 1; Emmanuelle Jouannet similarly describes international law as ‘intrinsically ambivalent', ‘simultaneously an instrument of domination and an instrument of emancipation': A Short Introduction to International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 1.

Tully, ‘On Law, Democracy and Imperialism', in Public Philosophy in a New Key (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), vol. 2, 127—65, at 127—8. domination? And what were the implications of this disjuncture for their ability to theorize and evaluate global political relations and events?

Vattel influentially conceptualized the international sphere as a space inhabited by free and equal states conceived as national communities, a depiction that for Vattel represented both a normative ambition and a rough description of the world around him.^[475] As an aspiration, this image encapsu­lated a commitment to the political autonomy of diverse communities that has been a central pillar of modern international political discourse, in the form of the principle of self-determination.

The emancipatory promise of Vattel's theory was captured by the historian of international law who, perhaps more than any other, anticipated the current scholarship in the critical history of international law, the Polish- British lawyer and historian C.H. Alexandrowicz (1902-75). Alexandrowicz, working at the University of Madras in the early years of Indian independence (1951-61), sought in the pre-nineteenth-century history of the law of nations a precedent and a model for the egalitarian and inclusive international legal order he, along with many jurists of the so-called New States, was working to instantiate.^[476] Alexandrowicz meant to set the historical record straight, from what he saw as its unfortunate Victorian detour, to show that international law both in theory and in practice had been far more inclusive than it was to become in the nineteenth century. At the center of Alexandrowicz's power­fully argued historical work lay the claim that there had been a radical shift in the history of the law of nations at the turn of the nineteenth century, from an earlier naturalist universalism - which took the law of nations to be based on the law of nature and therefore to apply universally - to a Eurocentric positivism that radically restricted the scope of the law of nations. His norma­tive commitments to the equality of post-colonial states and to a non- hierarchical global order based on mutual respect among states and societies drove his historical research.

Alexandrowicz saw his historical argument as a purely legal one that avoided the ‘political point of view'.^[478] This omission on Alexandrowicz’s part compromised his ability to discuss the complicity of international law with imperial power. His purpose was to show that colonial-era agreements should not be considered legally binding on post-colonial states and thereby to restore to international law its emancipatory role. But in arguing in this way, he drew an untenable distinction between the legal and the political. In contrast, as Martti Koskenniemi argues, ‘There is no space in international law that would... not involve a “choice” - that would not be, in this sense, a politics of international law.’^[479] It is that insistence of the more recent legal scholars writing the history of international law that law is always political that I think marks the most profound advance with respect to the otherwise compelling historiographical example that Alexandrowicz represents. I examine Vattel in this chapter in part because of his importance for Alexandrowicz's historical argument. I ask what role his theory of the law of nations, as arguably the most important authority during precisely the period that Alexandrowicz himself saw as marking the turn toward ‘Eurocentric egotism’ in international law, might have played in that turn, despite Alexandrowicz's own reading of Vattel’s law of nations as emancipatory and egalitarian in relation to extra­European states.