With Britain and International Law in West Africa, Inge Van Hulle brings us an important study and an impressive narrative of British imperial practices and the development of international law in nineteenth-century West Africa. Starting from the tactical use of Anglo-African agreements in the early nineteenth century through the Berlin Conference, Van Hulle seeks to give us an “on the ground” account that—drawing inspiration from work like that of Lauren Benton and Lisa Ford's Rage for Order—aims at paying attention to a “middle power” in the imperial hierarchy, and displays the messiness of the legal workings of imperial practice. Van Hulle at once separates her book from what she sees as the overly doctrinal focus of much of international legal history that tends to follow the back and forth of theoreticians of international law. She does this by bringing to the fore what she calls the “artisans of the legal instruments,” who “did not sit behind a desk in Downing Street at the Colonial Office [but who] were, in most cases, individuals who . . . languished in the British forts and factories scattered along the West coast” (13). Her study starts, focusing her initial attention on the period between 1807 and 1840, with the turn to paper compacts, moves through their transformation into instruments aimed at ending the slave trade starting in the 1840s, transitions to efforts at exerting British extraterritoriality in West Africa using and justifying the use of state violence labeled as “exemplary,” and finally addresses the effort at dispute settlement among European powers resulting in the Conference of Berlin in 1884–85.

Throughout the book, Van Hulle speaks to views and actions that were “vastly contradictory,” “inconsistent,” “scattered,” “incomplete,” and “rife with contradictions,” and were understood by contemporaries as “a legal mess” and included “juridical monsters.” Van Hulle paints a vivid picture of the vying forces and complexity: efforts to protect British merchants and missionaries who had gone beyond the territorial reach of the British Empire in a “moving frontier” against African forms of justice that they deemed barbarous, British aims to at once end slave trading while being shy of formally taking on territory because of the implicit requirement to end slavery in any annexed territory, and various stages of domestic British reluctance to expend military force to expand territory. Despite the significant complexity that she depicts at the core of her story, Van Hulle is able to provide a clear narrative flow. Early in her book, she tells us of the adoption by her artisans of agreements as “legal techniques” in addressing affairs on the ground. But she describes the center of gravity beginning to shift as she explains how these very legal techniques were subsumed by London. “In 1839,” she tells us, “Lord Palmerston requested that every treaty concluded over the past thirty years be sent to the Foreign Office for study” (81). Here Van Hulle describes the drafting of a “model agreement” that would serve as the framework for agreements across West Africa. Admittedly, not everyone followed the script, but the legal technology she describes became a matter of administrative knowledge acquisition and implementation at the center.

One of the splits described by Van Hulle that is extremely important to Britain in West Africa is between the role of the Colonial Office and that of the Foreign Office. Van Hulle points out that “[a]ccording to English domestic law, the Foreign Secretary and not the Colonial Secretary was responsible for the negotiation of diplomatic treaties with foreign powers” (85). She describes various attempts to eliminate the language of treaties and diplomacy and to replace it with the language of simple compacts and agreements. This is an important observation and prompts us to wonder further about the tension between the colonial and the international legal in British efforts in West Africa. Nigerian international lawyer Taslim Olawale Elias came out with a book in 1962 entitled British Colonial Law. As his subtitle, A Comparative Study of the Interaction of English and Local Laws in British Dependencies, suggests, he was writing a global study of legal interaction within jurisdictions that were fully British dependencies. But Elias's study indeed identified some of the themes that were carryovers from Van Hulle's “moving frontier” and British anxieties that she describes about the application of African law.

When Van Hulle's narrative reaches the Berlin Conference, it is clear that the various attempts at British expansion of authority through compact bumped up against continental views about territorial occupation. In Berlin, we are no longer in the world of Van Hulle's legal artisans; the European powers had to address their legacy resulting in what Van Hulle identifies as a “political compromise” (244). She explains that the compromise over “effective occupation” or “une jurisdiction suffisante” replaced the word “jurisdiction” with “authority” to create a vagueness that would tacitly accommodate the British extraterritorial model. Here she finds a “continued inability to make structural sense of the contradictions in the substance of legal instruments generated through imperialism, which seemed to require a theoretical exercise that both included and excluded indigenous people from the purview of Western law” (247). Essentially, she convinces us that the corners have not quite been rounded.

As Van Hulle completes her well-framed narrative of sequential complexities and the messiness of British imperial practice in West Africa, there were a couple of bracketed elements in that narrative. We wonder, for example, how she may have further pursued her reference to the agency of the Africans, perhaps updating some of the leads from K. Onwuka Dike's book of 1956, Trade and Politics in the Niger Delta, 1830-1885. Van Hulle also decided to keep the broader British colonial story mostly offstage, allowing it to appear only in a few places, like the role of the Ottoman Empire in the generation of the development of capitulations, or a mention of the Great Rebellion of 1857 in India and the Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865. Nevertheless, the view she gives us is impressive in bringing together important pieces of the puzzle of the exercise of legal technology by the British in West Africa and in giving us such a good sense of many of the countervailing forces at play.