A Case Study of the Construction of International Hierarchy: British Treaty-Making Against the Slave Trade in the Early Nineteenth Century

Abstract

This article evaluates different theories of hierarchy in international relations through a case study of the treaty system that the British constructed in the early nineteenth century in an effort to abolish the slave trade+ The treaty system was extraordinarily wide-ranging: it embraced European maritime powers, new republics in the Americas, Muslim rulers in northern and eastern Africa, and "Native Chiefs" on the western coast of Africa+ It therefore allows for a comparative analysis of the various types of treaty that the British made, depending on the identity of their contracting partners+ The article argues that a broadly constructivist approach provides the best explanation of why these variations emerged+ Although British treaty-making was influenced by the relative strength or weakness of the states with which they were dealing, the decisive factor that shaped the treaty system was a new legal doctrine that had emerged in the late eighteenth century, which combined a positivist theory of the importance of treaties as a source of international law with a distinction between the "family of civilized nations" and "barbarous peoples+" Despite the prominence of the concept of anarchy in international relations theory, there have been several attempts to explain how hierarchically structured systems work in international relations, why they rise and fall, why they take on the specific forms of stratification that they do, and what their impact is on broader international outcomes such as war and peace+ Some realists, for example, argue that inequalities in states' capabilities lead to the emergence of "hierarchies of prestige," and that great powers play a special role in direction of international affairs, Some of the arguments in this article were presented to a seminar at the University of Chicago, and I am grateful to members of the Political Science Department there for several valuable constructive criticisms+ I would also like to thank

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