The epilogue takes a broad and expansive view of the nature of the British empire in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century tropics. It argues that the British largely abandoned the settlement of the tropics by Europeans by the eighteenth century, becoming more convinced that it was a dangerously unhealthy place. They maintained their hold on the tropics by relying on non-Europeans. The ratios of non-Europeans to Europeans in the tropical empire continued to grow. Ideas about racial differences hardened and became more fully and ardently articulated. They were interwoven with notions of environmental determinism. The British turned more fully to soldiers of African descent in the Caribbean and Sepoy armies in India to help defend the empire. The epilogue explores the large-scale rebellions that erupted against the empire in nineteenth-century India and in the Caribbean, arguing that internal resistance helped to end slavery and, ultimately, the empire. It also underscores the ways in which English colonization and trade across the tropical zone was linked and how the wealth accrued through tropical exploitation and slavery helped facilitate the rise of the British empire.

The theories of rights articulated in the Americas during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were innovative in their own time and have exerted widespread influence ever since, but they were marked by profound contradictions that spurred generations of critical engagements. This chapter offers an explanation for these dynamics by considering the social position occupied by rights theorists within the Americas. It begins with the British and Spanish American independence movements, considering the roles of universalist and particularist rights claims within the ideologies of the movements’ European-descended leadership. Next, it explores how, in the instances where Americans that occupied less privileged social positions took over the leadership of struggles for independence, the kinds of rights claimed, the grounds upon which these rights were claimed, and the range of persons on behalf of whom rights were claimed varied in such a manner as to reflect the difference of leadership. Finally, it traces the ways that Americans initially excluded from enjoyment of the rights claimed by the independence movements and enumerated in the Americas’ early constitutions sought both recognition as equal rights-bearers and revisions to the rights that they and other Americans bore over the course of the nineteenth century.

This chapter periodises the British historiography of international law in five parts. Its first period extends from Robert Ward’s Enquiry into the Foundation and History of the Law of Nations in Europe (1795) to Thomas Erskine Holland’s Oxford inaugural lecture on Alberico Gentili (1874), and traces the gradual professionalisation of the discipline and its historical strain. The second part examines the entanglement of empire and historicism in British international legal historiography from around 1870 to roughly 1920. The third part treats the symbolic coming of age of British international legal historiography, between the founding of the British Yearbook of International Law in 1920, and Hersch Lauterpacht’s pivotal enunciation of the so-called ‘Grotian’ tradition of international law after the Second World War. The fourth part explores the history of international law in the succeeding ‘age of Lauterpacht’ up to c. 1960, when historiographical advances came increasingly from the semi-periphery rather than the centre and from disciplines other than international law. The fifth part takes stock of the transdisciplinary ‘turn’ to the history of international law in the British world and the chapter concludes with reflections on the nascent field of comparative international legal history in the light of British developments over the longue durée.

Steamships removed the message speed limit imposed by horses and sails, and telegraphy made communication almost instantaneous. Top state sizes expanded accordingly. Graphs superimpose the growth–decline curves of major post−1800 Engineer Empires. Britain became the largest empire ever (24% of world dry land area), but it lasted at more than half of its maximum size only for 110 years, comparable to nomad Xiongnu. State collapse in China also made Britain briefly the most populous of the world, due to its control of India. For most of the Engineer period Russia has been the largest and China (Qing and People’s Republic) the most populous. India’s population surpassed China’s in 2023. At the 1925 peak of European domination, 64% of Earth’s dry land area was ruled from Europe. It is now down to 21%, mainly Siberia. But European-stock Russia, USA, Canada, Brazil, and Australia remain part of the top seven, along with China and India. Population proportions differ. Since 1800, six to ten states have held more than 2% of Earth’s dry land area. Every half-century, three to four have entered or exited this category. By this pattern, 2000−2050 has been unusually quiet, up to now.

This chapter considers how and in what contexts the reasonable person standard was applied by the selected colonial courts of the British Empire. The key question is whether the reasonable person imported from England remained English in substance – whether it continued to resemble a man on the Clapham omnibus – or the courts tailored the standard to the specific circumstances before them. As the first section shows, there are many cases in which the reasonable person was equated with an Englishman. This suggests that the standard was static in nature. However, the second section of the chapter complicates this conclusion by introducing numerous cases and settings in which the standard was adapted to specific, local contexts – sometimes so successfully that local variants of it developed. Drawing together the first two sections, the final part considers the nexus between a standard’s resemblance to the people to whom it is applied and the authority of law.

States’ attempts to translate the messy realities of revolutionary-era coerced mobilities into orderly categories of law were met with efforts to define legal statuses by those forcibly removed. Focusing on revolutionary-era political refugees, the chapter shows how governments’ responses led to a proliferation of so-called alien laws across the Americas and Europe and how, despite their seemingly universal and neutral character, these laws reflected the ambiguous status and multiple mobilities during this period. As can be seen in a major legal battle involving a family of refugees of Haitian origin in Jamaica, the regulation of alien status had long-standing ramifications during a period in which the terms of political membership and state belonging were in full transformation across the Atlantic world. Both in mundane administrative interactions and legal battles, refugees engaged with the law and sought to shape and negotiate their status. In doing so, they could also rely on “vernacular” uses in other relevant branches of the law, such as legal distinctions governing freedom and slavery. As with freedom, belonging was not just granted or asserted by state authorities but could also be claimed and recrafted by those who sought it.

In 1823 and 1824, two newspaper editors, James Silk Buckingham and George Greig, were subjected to extrajudicial banishment after their respective newspapers were deemed dangerous influences on colonial society in Bengal (Buckingham) and the Cape of Good Hope (Greig). There are important resonances in the way in which these two separate episodes attracted controversy over the relationship between the executive and judicial branches of colonial government and the practice of using state-sanctioned banishment against dissenting political voices. They were also taken up in similar ways by British reformers who sought to embarrass conservatives at home by linking political struggles in the metropole with those of the imperial periphery. As a result, the cases raise legal and constitutional questions over personal liberty, state security, and subjecthood that extended far beyond their original colonial contexts.

Taking as starting point the lives of an Irish general and a Cretan naval officer, both involved in the 1820 revolution in Sicily, the chapter explores the ways in which mobility and conflict interacted in the post-Napoleonic period across the Mediterranean, and connected revolution and counter-revolution in North Africa, Sicily, Naples, Spain, Portugal, and the Aegean Sea in the 1820s. These case studies show the overlap between the categories of volunteer and mercenary, imperial agent and freedom fighter, refugee and economic migrant, as well as their fluidity. More generally, they point to the very different ways in which one could become a revolutionary and the plurality of motivations behind such a decision. They suggest that while the Napoleonic Wars were crucial to produce new types of displacement, it is important to consider them also in continuity with longer-term, Early Modern patterns of mobility across the Mediterranean.

Guano imperialism marked the first major commodity rush into the Pacific. Between 1850 and 1900, the United States claimed over a hundred islands across the world through the Guano Act of 1856. Why did the United States develop a guano empire? Most scholarly attention focuses on state-led explanations for guano imperialism, like the influence of American farmers and naval lobbies on Congress. By contrast, this chapter presents evidence that entrepreneurs led the way into the Pacific. A sudden rise in guano prices led US entrepreneurs to search for guano and threats to their interests from foreign competitors led them to search for government protection.

Focusing on the island of Borneo, this chapter explains why Brunei – but not the other administrative units on Borneo – achieved separate independence. Nineteenth-century European expansion into Southeast Asia divided the island of Borneo into four administrative units: Brunei, Sarawak, North Borneo, and Dutch Borneo. The first three, located in the northern part of the island, were under British colonial rule, while the southern half was under Dutch colonial rule. They were highly similar to each other prior to colonization, but their decolonization outcomes diverged; Dutch Borneo became part of Indonesia, and Sarawak and North Borneo became part of Malaysia, while Brunei rejected to be merged into Malaysia in 1963 and eventually became independent separately in 1984. This chapter conducts historical within-case and comparative case studies to show that oil and the protectorate system enabled Brunei’s separate independence, while the lack of these two factors resulted in the incorporation of the other three colonial units into larger entities.

Shifting the focus from Borneo to the Persian Gulf, this chapter explains why Qatar and Bahrain – but not the other administrative units in the lower Gulf – achieved separate independence. Britain had been involved in the Persian Gulf for centuries until its withdrawal in 1971. Through treaties signed by the British and local rulers, there had been nine separate sheikhdoms in the lower Gulf with the same colonial status of a British protected state: Abu Dhabi, Ajman, Bahrain, Dubai, Fujairah, Qatar, Ras al-Khaimah, Sharjah, and Umm al-Quwain. They had similar social, cultural, political, and historical backgrounds, but they varied in their decolonization outcomes. All of them participated in negotiations under Abu Dhabi’s initiative between 1968 and 1971 to form a federation. Among the other eight, six eventually joined the newly established United Arab Emirates. The other two, Qatar and Bahrain, however, chose to achieve independence on their own. This chapter analyzes the sheikhdoms in depth using within-case and comparative analyses to reveal that Qatar and Bahrain achieved separate independence because of their early oil development and the protectorate system, while the lack of these two factors resulted in the incorporation of the others into the UAE.

The chapter introduces the book by presenting the puzzle it seeks to explain. During the decolonization process, colonial and regional powers frequently pursued the policy of amalgamation to avoid creating micro-states, which resulted in numerous cases of merger. However, some rejected merger projects and became independent separately. What, then, accounts for their separate existence? More generally, why did some colonial areas achieve independence separately from neighboring regions when facing pressure for amalgamation or annexation, while others became part of a larger state? This chapter then elaborates the main line of argument and the theoretical framework that underpins it. It argues that oil and a specific type of colonial administration carved out producing areas to create a state that would otherwise not exist. The introduction ends by briefly discussing methods and explaining the structure of the book.