RCCHC "China and the World: Historical Interactions" Talk Series - Sovereigns in Question: European Maritime Prize Courts and Non-European Princes in the Long Eighteenth Century

This talk uses European maritime prize law to probe how Europeans in the long eighteenth century thought about the sovereignty of non-European princes, ranging from the heads of small West African principalities to the emperors of China and India. Prize was the legal regime that governed the seizure and adjudication of enemy ships and cargoes in wartime. Sovereign power always played a central role in the legal arguments over what constituted legal or “valid” prize. In a small but important subset of prize cases, non-European princes and their legal status played a key role in the courts’ reasoning and the outcome of cases. This paper draws on manuscript and printed prize cases in French, English and several other European languages to examine how actors in the prize regime construed the sovereignty of non-European princes in the Atlantic and Mediterranean, and in maritime Asia. It shows the centrality of non-European princes to prize jurisprudence. It demonstrates that prize tribunals viewed non-European sovereignty as an act rather than a fact: the sovereignty of non-European princes had to be demonstrated by actions, both of sovereign and subject. This contingent view of sovereignty, I argue, extended to European princes as well, rendering the extra-European world a model for European notions of sovereignty, rather than the exception to them.