Jennifer Pitts’s Boundaries of the International is an excellent study of law and empire in European political thought across the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Meticulously researched and elegantly structured, it should quickly become a standard text on the politics of law, international political theory, global intellectual history, and the critical history of international law. It will also appeal to scholars interested in Islam in European thought and the racialized genealogies of the international.
Pitts compellingly demonstrates how the law of nations’ Eurocentric universalism and exceptionalism facilitated empire. The book maps the historical debates about the scope of international law and community, as well as the rationales for and implications of its inclusions and exclusions. It scrutinizes the principles, prejudices, and practices that interlocutors treated as authoritative or criticized as hypocritical. Building on postcolonial critiques and the work of C. H. Alexandrowicz (1902–75)—whose essays Pitts edited with David Armitage in a volume titled The Law of Nations in Global History (2017)—she undoes the conventional European-triumphalist narrative about the gradual inclusion of Europe’s others into its laws; in fact, that is the exceptionalist, developmentalist, racialized discourse that Pitts historicizes and provincializes, starting with its myth of an egalitarian order of equal states. The book is both a history of our global present, in which law reentrenches and conceals asymmetries of power, and an attempt to indicate paths not taken.
Pitts highlights, especially in the introduction and the epilogue, that the frame of inclusion/exclusion—of formal recognition and mere standing—misses the fundamental, structural global asymmetries of power between European empires and the Global South. At stake are the terms of inclusion/exclusion, or how both can facilitate domination (pp. 9–10). The narrative weaves these threads into a rich tapestry, with three recurring patterns: as a political discourse, Pitts argues, the law served to justify empire, obscure empire, and critique empire (pp. 3–4, 190–91). Pitts aims to recover the critiques as resources, or—at risk of overextending the metaphor—as threads in a different color that interrupt the dominant pattern or even trace a counter-pattern from this same fabric.
Chapter 2 begins at the margins, distilling the Ottoman Empire’s role as the “defining marginal case” (p. 28) in European thought. Pitts focuses on “oriental despotism,” its relationship to Paul Rycaut’s ambivalence about the Turk, its formulation in Montesquieu’s systemization, and the early orientalist Anquetil-Duperron’s criticisms of the category. Subsequent chapters, arranged chronologically, tend to share this structure, surveying thinkers who exemplify strategies that justify and obscure empire and then turning to dissenting voices. The contrasts bring into sharp relief the blatant civilizationalism and racialization of dominant Eurocentric formulations. At the same time, this arc can make the critics look better than they might on their own.
Chapter 3, on Emer de Vattel’s universalism, illuminates his elisions of empire, his ambiguities and ambivalences about the law of nations’ scope, and his Eurocentric unevenness, most notably in his treatment of Muslim sites and sources. Vattel is a recurring thread, elegantly binding the book; when thinkers in the next chapters appealed to his Droit des gens, its ambiguities became productive in contradictory directions. Chapter 4, on “critical legal universalism” in the late eighteenth century, analyzes Warren Hastings’s vision of hierarchically arranged worlds, in contrast to the views of Edmund Burke and English judge William Scott. Burke and Scott, Pitts argues, championed an alternative universalism, one that treats the law of nations as binding on Europeans in their conduct abroad, does not impose European norms on others, and recognizes (parts of) the extra-European world as having sovereignty and laws that obligate Europeans.
Chapters 5 and 6, on the first and second halves of the nineteenth century, respectively, discuss the eventual displacement of Vattel as an authority, the rise of positivism and professionalization of international law, and the development of historicism. These chapters showcase permutations of the scope of law, including arguments for pluralism and reciprocity, and others based on civilizationist historicism and racialized developmentalism. They draw out how European exceptionalism and universalism blended to give international law a triumphalist European origin and universal authority over all others.
The book brings together critical international law, global intellectual history, and political theory. It shows, powerfully and devastatingly, how permutations of the international justified dispossession, naturalized subjugation, and constituted Europe’s others asymmetrically, including in some legally pluralistic iterations. Its historical, geographic, and ideological range is impressive. In a short but fundamental section in chapter 5, Pitts discusses how the Chinese official Lin Zexu and the Algerian intellectual Hamdan Khodja appealed to Vattel in order to challenge European abuses (pp. 137–41). Her discussions of Khodja and Lin model the importance of foregrounding power when turning to extra-European contexts and sources: these intellectuals’ (unsuccessful) deployments of Vattel paint a fuller global picture of legal discourse’s structural weaponization, the perpetual belatedness of the colony, and global asymmetries in discourses about global asymmetry.
The use of Vattel as a structuring device is compelling. It illustrates how a canonized text exceeds its context and haunts later discourses—simultaneously the site and content of disagreement—and how the historical productivity of reinterpretations depends on the text’s own elisions and which parts readers emphasize. Pitts tracks who can successfully cite which texts authoritatively. By the time that Khodja cites Vattel, he is too late; Europeans no longer treat Vattel as an authority (p. 145). The colonial structure of knowledge is striking and resonates with what others have described as the present’s own epistemic structures of belatedness. Once concepts and frameworks are deployed in the Global South and by minoritized populations, the metropole’s elite will have conveniently moved on or decentered that framework. The rules continuously change to reentrench asymmetry.
In light of such asymmetries, I want to pull a few threads surrounding the historical critiques that Boundaries carefully reconstructs. This is both to extend Pitts’s acknowledgments of some critiques’ limits and double-edges (pp. 5, 115, 179), including that some were “not necessarily anti-imperial” (p. 95) or justified alternative imperial forms (p. 98), and to reflect on the work that critiques can or cannot do—from exposing empire to obscuring it, from staging resistance to deflecting it.
The first critic whom Pitts recovers is Anquetil-Duperron. She notes that his Législation orientale “had little impact in its day, and Anquetil’s profound critique of European provincialism and racism and their connection to abuses of power were largely forgotten” (p. 65). But Anquetil-Duperron’s criticism of Europeans, which proceeded by insisting on Asians’ lawfulness, interpreting Qurʼānic verses, and shaming Europeans for hypocrisy, was internal to orientalism as a discursive field or modality. Orientalism, after all, simultaneously served to work out European identity and constitute a structure of knowledge-authority about the Orient based on Europeans’ observations and ancient texts. Although his orientalism was more cosmopolitan than demonizing, the critique’s position of articulation might not be easy to separate from or abstract into a technique. I do not mean that sources of critique should be untainted (which we agree is not what is at stake [p. 27]), but that interpretive location matters—not just interpretive posture.
Pitts persuasively argues that Anquetil-Duperron and Burke adopt a posture of interpretive generosity (pp. 8, 60) by reading (at least some) non-Europeans “as if” they are obeying the law of nations, thereby emphasizing continuity and presenting them in familiar terms (pp. 67, 106–7). Here, she warns that this posture is assimilationist and refuses to acknowledge difference (or be challenged by it—perhaps it betrays a will to have already known). The extent to which the as-if and generosity are a critical resource, for who, and toward which ends, remains a question. I worry that the powerful just as easily either suspend disbelief to act as-if or not, choose to interpret generously or not. After all, when Khodja modeled interpretive generosity for his European interlocutors, they simply dismissed him as a fanatic and deceitful Muslim (p. 141); it is also unclear how far European interpretive generosity would have taken Algerian independence.
Second, and relatedly, a number of the critiques across the book are at the register of moral character or attitude: to deny that non-Europeans have law, to call them fanatics or uncivilized, or to impose European laws on them is, some critics say, presumptuous, arrogant, self-serving, bigoted, hypocritical, and deceitful. This form of critique does not fully congeal with Pitts’s own more direct and compelling description of “a capitalist world system” that bound “European metropoles and extra-European states and societies” in “a profoundly asymmetrical process, with international law playing an important role in justifying and stabilizing inequalities of wealth and military power.” One must confront “an imperial global order” and “the role of domination in the history of international law” (pp. 14, 191). Put differently, some of the critiques are, like Pitts’s, about domination, power asymmetries, naturalized racializations, capitalism, and structures of law and empire; other critiques, in foregrounding attitude, sensibility, or moral character, can serve to obscure the structure of empire by reinforcing the sense that shaming the powerful can end oppression.
Finally, if some critiques and resources conceal or even sustain empire while others, perhaps like Khodja on Algerian independence and indigenous politics, expose and oppose it, it is necessary to further distinguish between their deployments. On the one hand, the book’s final list of thinkers who offer “resources for critique and frameworks for envisioning greater justice and equity” successfully showcases a vast range of periods and arguments: “Anquetil-Duperron to Hamdan Khodja and Henry Stanley, to C. H. Alexandrowicz and Mohammed Bedjaoui” (p. 191). At the same time, their different critiques represent nonequivalent resources and situated orientations toward power and oppression. As resources, they authorize different political projects. Some of these critiques, then, enable not just critical but perhaps more directly structurally transformative and decolonial politics, in which the law can be made into an instrument for another purpose—namely, resistance.
