The field of legal and imperial history has seen a number of groundbreaking works in recent years, paving the way for a new understanding of the jurisdictional and territorial relationship between European empires and their overseas colonies. Amidst this new wave of scholarship is Empire by Treaty, edited by Saliha Belmessous and collecting the writings of a sterling group of historians and legal scholars. The book stands as an excellent companion volume to Belmessous's edited collection, Native Claims: Indigenous Law against Empire, (2011, also from Oxford University Press), which focused on the use of imperial law by subjugated peoples when negotiating and navigating the colonial encounter. Together these two volumes provide valuable insights into the ways in which the British and other empires carried out their projects of overseas expansion, highlighting the central role of legal texts and agreements for these processes, as well as the complicated interactive relationship between colonizers and colonized.

The individual contributions illustrate the range of polities and political entities that European empires negotiated treaties with, from the early seventeenth century to the end of the nineteenth century. While the book is comparative in scope the British Empire is well represented, with chapters on treaty making and colonization in British North America, by Daniel K. Richter and Alain Beaulieu; in West Africa, by Rebecca Shumway; in South Asia, by Robert Travers; and in Oceania, by Belmessous and Damen Ward. The volume also contains a chapter by Tamar Herzog on territorial conflicts with indigenous polities in Spanish and Portuguese America, and a marvelous piece by Arthur Weststeijn on Dutch colonial expansion in Southeast Asia and the tension between the legal legacies of Erasmus and Machiavelli. The book concludes with a chapter by Paul Patton contemplating the role and legacy of historical treaty making for current postcolonial settler societies, especially as it concerns indigenous rights. It speaks to the effort of Belmessous as editor that all of the contributions are of a very high quality. British historians in particular would do well to read Shumway's examination of British diplomatic approaches to the various Asante and Fante polities on the African Gold Coast, as well as Beaulieu's analysis of the ambivalent use of treaties by first French and later British administrators in the gradual process of dispossessing aboriginal Canadians of their land.

While the act of treaty making was clearly guided by the legal writings of men such as Hugo Grotius and Alberico Gentili, the practice itself, as carried out by colonial officials and imperial middlemen, played an enormous role in shaping the institutions of global law. Empire by Treaty illustrates this point remarkably well, emphasizing the need for historians to move beyond the confines of legal philosophy to the actual practices of lawyers and diplomats on the ground when writing the history of law and empire. Several of the contributions adopt such a perspective, focusing more on the texts of otherwise overlooked treaties and on the relations between their signatories than on the writings of European legal thinkers, often to great effect. The chapters also work well in illustrating the messiness and complexity of the political status and recognition involved in colonial interactions, as the legal and diplomatic instruments employed by European empires coexisted, however uneasily, with violent coercion and the use of force. Sovereignty was rarely a clearly defined prerequisite for such negotiations, but rather a legal fiction emerging out of the very process of treaty making itself, sometimes only to be revoked or ignored as a consequence of the territorial or jurisdictional concessions ostensibly agreed upon.

Perhaps the most surprising omission in the collection is any piece dealing directly with the treaties between the Qing Empire and European powers. From the Treaty of Nanjing to the wider phenomenon of “unequal treaties” throughout the nineteenth century, the role of treaty making in imperial expansion in East Asia seems of obvious importance. While one might argue that this is already one of the more closely studied areas of imperial treaty making, a volume with as ambitious and critical a scope as the present would do well to tackle the role of China in European expansion. Such a contribution might also shed further light on another important aspect of European imperial treaty making, namely the role of treaty negotiations in the relations with indigenous imperial polities that were never subjected to full colonization.

Although the individual contributions point in many different directions and cover a lot of ground, both geographically and chronologically, the volume very clearly stands as a coherent whole. It presents a cogent argument for the centrality of treaties in the history of global law and for the lasting legacies of European colonial institutions. The introduction expresses a further hope that these contributions might help illuminate current disputes over land in postcolonial countries. This aim is perhaps overly optimistic, especially considering the general view of the coercive nature of colonial states provided by many of the chapters. While such insights are valuable in adding perspective to current legal conflicts, it seems hard to imagine states and governments of today reaching more just resolutions of land disputes based on a deeper understanding of past misdeeds. What Empire by Treaty most certainly does shed light on, however, are the many and varied ways in which European empires expanded into indigenous lands using codes of law and treaty making as a central tool of acquisition and coercion. In this sense it represents an invaluable addition to the legal and political history of imperial expansion, worthwhile reading as much for those interested in the history of law as for historians of empire.