Treaties as Technologies of Empire: Legal Accumulation and the Making of Imperial Authority

The British Empire extended authority across vast territories without permanently occupying most of them. Across the nineteenth century, local rulers retained formal sovereignty for decades while their autonomy gradually narrowed. Treaty by treaty, what had begun as a commercial relationship or defensive alliance became, over time, something that looked like subordination. This dissertation identifies the mechanism that produced that transformation.

Treaties as Technologies of Empire argues that iterative treaty-making was a technology of imperial expansion through which imperial authority expanded incrementally within formally sovereign polities. The carrier was the treaty; the mechanism was the law inside it: jurisdictional clauses, contractual obligations, maritime regulations. Across successive treaty rounds, those provisions did not merely describe the relationship between British authority and local sovereignty—they restructured it, each legal deposit narrowing what was available for the next negotiation.

Two concepts organize the theoretical argument. Accumulation refers to the incremental transfer of sovereign authorities through legal instruments. Because sovereignty is divisible—a collection of authorities—treaty provisions could transfer those functions piecemeal, with structural asymmetries resetting the baseline between transactions so that each successive instrument treated prior accumulations as its starting point. Infrastructure refers to the durable institutional and conceptual residue left by legal acts—courts, doctrinal categories, standardized provisions—that persisted beyond the agreements creating them and structured the terrain on which future negotiations unfolded. Infrastructure is not merely the record of prior accumulation; it is the condition that makes further accumulation directional rather than episodic.

Three legal logics organized the instruments through which this dynamic operated. Jurisdiction law restructured the legal environment of adjacent polities through extraterritorial courts and boundary regimes without requiring territorial possession. Contract law converted political relationships into enforceable exchanges that commodified sovereign functions and made their shortfall actionable as breach. Maritime law displaced local control over waterways by converting bilateral navigational concessions into presumed universal rights.

The empirical chapters trace these logics through six cases: Sierra Leone and the Cape Frontier (jurisdiction), Oudh and Aden (contract), and Sindh and the Niger Delta (maritime law). The pairs vary on dimensions the mechanism does not explain—tempo, activation, and the relationship between doctrine and practice—while leaving the underlying logic intact.

The argument identifies the operating mechanism that accounts of indirect rule leave unspecified, demonstrates how imperial legal doctrines were forged through engagement with non-European polities rather than prior to it, and offers a framework for understanding colonial expansion as institutionalized penetration—the gradual redistribution of sovereign authority through law rather than its replacement through conquest.