In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Empire by Treaty: Negotiating European expansion, 1600-1900 ed. by Saliha Belmessous
  • John McLaren
Empire by Treaty: Negotiating European expansion, 1600-1900 Edited by Saliha Belmessous. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.

This very impressive book of essays on treaty-making between European imperial powers and ndigenous peoples follows on from and jibes well with Sahila Belmoussous’ previous collection Native Claims: Indigenous Law Against Empire published in 2014. In the latter a central theme is the importance of seeking out the Indigenous voice in looking at colonial legal history. It is also timely because of the renewed interest in United States Treaties with Indian Nations, highlighted in the ongoing special exhibit at the National Museum of the American Indian Museum in Washington, DC, and brilliantly curated by Susan Shown Harjo,1 and several recent graduate theses in Canada that seek to explore treaty-making from Aboriginal perspectives.

In her introductory essay Belmessous clearly and effectively sets out the arguments for researching and discussing treaty-making, and its role in the history of Indigenous peoples and their encounter with the colonizing impulses of imperial powers. She highlights the need to pay attention to Indigenous as well as European motivations in these encounters; to relate theories on the validity (or otherwise) of Europeans treating with non-Christian rulers and peoples to actual practice; to chart the variety of purposes to which the treaty-making was put, and the variability and relative clout of the parties contracting; and, to expose the tensions between the legal demands of consent, recognition and obligation on the one hand and imperial realpolitik on the other. She makes it clear that this historiographic project benefits from an approach which examines treaty-making in a comparative imperial context—looking at not only Great Britain, but also Holland, Portugal, Spain and France. The comparative approach highlights common features within these histories, such as the motivation of imperial competition for power and authority in the same geographic area; the effects of the relative political and military power of the parties to treaties and their relationship to time, place and object; and the inevitable impulses of various European powers and their colonial representatives to find ways and means, juridical and fraudulent, or both, to revise the relationships or deny their legal significance in favour of their more important policies and objectives, whether expanding trade, facilitating settlement or promoting strategic objectives.

The essays are well chosen to illustrate the central theme of the collection—treaty-making with the exercise of sovereignty and territorial governance and title to land as important objectives. Arthur Weststejn examines how theories of treaty-making associated with Machiavelli, Erasmus and especially Grotius were reflected in the no-nonsense policies and practice of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) in extending and consolidating its commercial holdings and thus territory in the East Indies. This in the face of waning Portuguese and emerging English competition for trade in Southeast Asia, and episodic Indigenous resistance to its presence and policies. Tamara Herzog looks at the urge to conclude treaties with Indigenous groups in South America by both Portugal and Spain in contested areas of sovereignty between them, and the development of imperial ambivalence about the trustworthiness and representativeness of Aboriginal contracting parties when colonial governments experienced pushback or playing off both sides on their part.

The chapters on North America by Daniel Richter and Alain Beaulieu provide a remarkably clear, evolving history of treaty-making or its avoidance over the years from 1600 to 1820. This was a period, as Richter shows, during which the chaos of colonial land holding and title in the thirteen colonies during the seventeenth century produced by varying legal regimes of settlement and the disruption of the Civil War and Restoration was gradually replaced by recognition of both Crown sovereignty and Aboriginal title as the dual legal roots of land holding and title. Beaulieu for his part shows how timing of settlement and imperial calculation of the value of the support of Indian nations, in the face of first French and then American enmity, produced a set of diverse strategies for the level and strength of recognition of Indigenous rights in land during the eighteenth and...

Share