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

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Date

17 Mar 2026
Organiser

Research Centre for Chinese History and Culture, Department of Chinese History and Culture
Time

10:30 - 12:00
Venue

EF312, PolyU Campus

Speaker

Prof. Nathan Perl-Rosenthal

Enquiry

Ms Carmen LAW 34008979 rcchc@polyu.edu.hk

Remarks

This talk will be delivered in English

Summary

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.

Keynote Speaker

Prof. Nathan Perl-Rosenthal

Research Director at the National Centre for Scientific Research (France)
Professor of History, French and Italian and Law at the University of Southern California

Nathan Perl-Rosenthal is Directeur de recherhes at the CNRS (France) and Professor of History, French and Italian and Law at the University of Southern California. He is currently working on his fourth book, a global history of maritime prize (seizures of cargoes and ships at sea in wartime) from a transimperial perspective, circa 1600-1900. The book will explore the key role of prize-taking in the construction of the first European world empires and their transformation in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. His research focuses broadly on the political and cultural history of Europe and the Americas in the age of revolution. His first book was on sailors and the politics of nationality; the second was a generational history of the Atlantic age of revolutions; the third (forthcoming in June 2026) is a history of the "long" American Revolution as seen through Fourth of July orations.

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