Imagining World Order: International Law and Literature in Britain, 1876-1907

Abstract

This dissertation reconstructs the international legal imagination of late-nineteenth-century Britain. Traversing different registers of discourse—from novels and newspapers to legal treatises and conference proceedings—I show how writers and thinkers at the turn of the century imagined the systemic basis of, and thus imparted form to, inter-imperial relations. This chase for coherence was consequential, I argue, because it drew the politics of empire into a more continuous relationship with the liberal signposts of law and order. Anatomizing this conjunction, “Imagining World Order” thus proposes a theoretical and historical corrective to the tendency in transnational and postcolonial theory to treat the scene of British imperial rule as some sort of despotic state of exception or remnant of premodern barbarity. Against these binary schemes, which miss the intimacy between order and violence, this dissertation illuminates the narrative tactics that figured the world as an integrated if uneven totality. Each chapter unfolds an imaginative commitment to transimperial equilibrium. My first chapter unpacks an explosion of mid-Victorian debates about the territorial parameters of sovereignty. Those parameters are thrown into relief by George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, a self-consciously globalizing novel that represents the “comity of nations” as the product of territorial integration. My second chapter reads the reports of Sir Travers Twiss, the British jurist who gave legal form to the colonial exploits of King Leopold II of Belgium, alongside the early imperial romances of H. Rider Haggard. Just as Twiss envisions the colonial sphere as a continuously legal space in which sovereignty can be packaged, sold, and distributed, so does Haggard imagine the project of conquest in terms of an orderly series of exchange relationships. My third chapter takes the politics of international investment law as an interpretive framework for Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo, which issues a full-throated dismissal of the rules of geopolitical economy, only to cynically insist on the inevitability of their institutional installment. My fourth chapter records the curiously extralegal, moralistic arguments that derailed the Second Hague Peace Conference of 1907, thereby earning the indignation of internationalists like H.G. Wells. His early essays and novels reflect this well-earned outrage, even as they also reproduce the moralism of the legalist paradigm, figuring its reform in terms of spiritual or cultural regeneration. Highly ambivalent, the discourse of law and order proves to be central to the violent arrival of the twentieth century.