The Triumph of the State
Absolutism and balance-of-power diplomacy entrench the new order. Utrecht (1713) formalizes equilibrium as an explicit treaty principle. The sovereign state becomes the only legitimate actor on the international stage. Empires, on this view, are sovereign states that happen to extend across oceans.
Part of Farewell To Westphalia
14 moments in this segment.
- — The Fronde Suppressed. Louis XIV, in Roman armour, trampling an allegorical figure of the Fronde (1653). Sculpture, Louvre-Lens. Place: Paris, Kingdom of France Figures: Louis XIV, fourteen years old · Anne of Austria, queen regent · Cardinal Mazarin, returning from exile · Louis II de Bourbon, Prince de Condé, in flight to Spain Five Years of Two Frondes The Fronde begins in 1648, the same year as Westphalia. The parlements of Paris refuse new taxes; the great nobles, led by Condé, take up arms against Mazarin and the regency. Twice the boy king is forced to flee the capital. Twice he returns. The second Fronde, the Fronde des princes, fuses noble revolt with foreign war: Condé takes a Spanish commission and fights against his own kingdom from the Netherlands. By the end of 1652 the rebellion has exhausted itself. Paris, sick of barricades and grain shortages, recalls the king. Louis XIV enters the capital on 21 October 1652. Mazarin returns from exile in February 1653. Confirmed. Bordeaux (the Ormée) capitulated on 3 August 1653 per Wikipedia (Fronde / Ormée). 'The previous August' is therefore off by ~6 months relative to Mazarin's February 1653 return — Bordeaux actually fell AFTER Mazarin's return, not before it. Suggest rewriting as: 'The last rebel stronghold, Bordeaux, falls in August 1653.' The kingdom is, for the first time since the wars of religion, undivided under one royal authority. The Model State The lesson Louis takes from his childhood is permanent: no parlement, no prince, no city is to be permitted an autonomous political will. When Mazarin dies in 1661 the king announces he will rule personally, without a first minister. The Roi-Soleil begins. Versailles is enlarged into a court whose function is to keep the high nobility under daily surveillance, gilded and disarmed. Other European chanceries study the result. The intendant system, the standing army of 300,000, the centralized treasury under Colbert, the codification of law and customs, the disciplining of provincial estates. French absolutism becomes the operating manual of post-Westphalian sovereignty. The Westphalian principle of 1648 (the sovereign is supreme within his borders) requires, the French case suggests, an internal machinery powerful enough to make that supremacy real. Prussia, Sweden, Austria, Russia, Spain, the Italian states all imitate, with local adjustments.
- — The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Louis XIV signing the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, 18 October 1685. Place: Château de Fontainebleau, France Figures: Louis XIV, signing the Edict of Fontainebleau · Michel Le Tellier, chancellor, drafting the text on his deathbed · Madame de Maintenon, the king's secret wife · the Huguenot consistories, suddenly illegal Eighty-Seven Years of Toleration, Revoked Henri IV signed the Edict of Nantes in 1598, ending the French Wars of Religion by granting Protestants the right to worship in specified places, hold office, and garrison fortified towns. The compromise had been corroded for decades: the fortified places lost under Richelieu, public worship narrowed under Mazarin, the dragonnades of 1681 (forced billeting of dragoons in Huguenot households) producing nominal conversions by the tens of thousands. On 18 October 1685, at Fontainebleau, Louis XIV signs the revocation. Protestant churches are to be demolished. Protestant schools are closed. Pastors have fifteen days to leave the kingdom; ordinary Huguenots are forbidden to follow them on pain of the galleys for men and imprisonment for women. The king's preamble announces that the original edict is no longer necessary because there are, effectively, no Protestants left in France. The statement is performative: it becomes true by being declared. The Cost of Total Sovereignty Within a few years roughly 200,000 Huguenots emigrate, in defiance of the law, to England, the United Provinces, Brandenburg-Prussia, Switzerland, and the American colonies. They are weavers, watchmakers, printers, naval officers, financiers. Brandenburg's Great Elector issues the Edict of Potsdam within a fortnight, offering tax exemptions and travel costs; Berlin's textile and luxury trades are reconstituted around the new arrivals. France's losses are concrete and lasting. The silk industry of Tours and Lyon contracts. Naval shipbuilding loses key technicians. The Bank of England, founded in 1694, is staffed disproportionately by Huguenot refugees and their descendants. The first major demonstration of post-Westphalian absolutism produces also the first major demonstration of its price: sovereign reach over the private confession of subjects is technically possible, and economically punitive on a century-long horizon. Other rulers (William III, the Great Elector, later Joseph II) draw the corresponding lesson.
- — The Glorious Revolution. William III of England, by Sir Godfrey Kneller, the Dutch stadtholder who landed at Torbay in November 1688. Place: Brixham, Torbay; London; Westminster Figures: William of Orange, Stadtholder of the United Provinces, arriving with 463 ships · James II, fleeing twice · Mary II, joint sovereign · the Convention Parliament The Invitation and the Invasion James II is a Catholic king of a Protestant kingdom, busy by 1688 with the prerogative suspension of penal laws against Catholics and dissenters, a standing army he refuses to disband, and (in June) a male heir who guarantees a Catholic succession. Seven peers, drawn from both Whig and Tory ranks, sign an invitation to William of Orange, husband of James's Protestant daughter Mary, to come and defend English liberties and the Protestant religion. William lands at Brixham on 5 November 1688 with about 21,000 troops, the largest invasion of England since 1066. He marches on London without a battle. James's army melts; his daughter Anne defects; his nose bleeds at Salisbury. On the night of 11 December James throws the Great Seal into the Thames and flees. He is briefly recaptured by fishermen who mistake him for a Jesuit, allowed to escape a second time, and reaches France on 23 December. William has the throne by default. The Bill of Rights The Convention Parliament meets in January 1689. Its solution is procedural and constitutional: James has abdicated by his flight; the throne is vacant; it is offered jointly to William and Mary on conditions. The conditions are written down as the Declaration of Rights and enacted in December as the Bill of Rights. The Crown shall not suspend laws, levy taxes, maintain a standing army in peacetime, or interfere with parliamentary elections, free speech in Parliament, or the right of Protestant subjects to bear arms, without parliamentary consent. The post-Westphalian sovereign is now plural. Where the Bourbon model fuses sovereignty in a single person, the English settlement distributes it between Crown and Parliament, with the bulk of the substance migrating to the latter over the eighteenth century. The two versions (Versailles absolutism, Westminster constitutionalism) will compete throughout the next 130 years for the definition of what Westphalian sovereignty actually contains, and the American revolutionaries of 1776 will explicitly conscript the second version against the first. Video: Lucy Worsley's BBC episode arguing that the 'Glorious Revolution' of 1688 was in fact a Dutch invasion sanitised by later Whig historians.
- — The Peace of Utrecht. Allegory on the Peace of Utrecht, 1713, ending the War of the Spanish Succession. Place: Utrecht, United Provinces of the Netherlands Figures: Louis XIV of France, defeated · Anne of Great Britain · Philip V of Spain, contested heir · the Habsburg emperor refusing to sign The War of the Spanish Succession Louis XIV's grandson takes the Spanish throne in 1700. The prospect that Bourbon France and Bourbon Spain might fuse, controlling the Iberian peninsula, the Spanish Netherlands, much of Italy, and the Spanish overseas empire, is intolerable to England, the Dutch Republic, and the Habsburg Emperor. The Grand Alliance forms; war begins in 1701. Eleven years of European-and-Atlantic war end inconclusively. France is exhausted; Philip V retains Spain but renounces his French inheritance and his heirs' French inheritance. The alliance cannot dislodge him; he cannot count on French support to expand. Balance as Treaty Principle Utrecht does something Westphalia had implied but not stated. Article II of the Anglo-French treaty formalizes balance of power as the explicit guiding principle of European peace. The signatories commit to maintain an equilibrium so that no single power can dominate the others. The Westphalian principle of sovereign equality is now operationalized as a method: alliances will form against any state that grows too strong. The cost: Spain's overseas empire begins to fragment (Gibraltar and Minorca to Britain, the asiento slave-trading monopoly to Britain, Sicily to Savoy, the Spanish Netherlands to Austria). Britain emerges as the principal maritime power. The British century begins, on terms that explicitly maintain Westphalian sovereign equality among European states while consolidating Britain's edge outside Europe. Video: The war that produced Utrecht and the explicit codification of balance-of-power as treaty principle.
- — The Treaty of Rastatt. Prince Eugene of Savoy and Marshal de Villars at Rastatt, 1714, by Paul Dominique Philippoteaux. Place: Schloss Rastatt, Margraviate of Baden-Baden Figures: Prince Eugene of Savoy, for Emperor Charles VI · Marshal Claude Louis Hector de Villars, for Louis XIV · Charles VI himself, refusing to sign anything bearing the title of Philip V of Spain The Emperor's Late Peace The Treaty of Utrecht (see [[peace-of-utrecht-1713]]) closes the War of the Spanish Succession for everyone except the Holy Roman Emperor, who refuses to recognize Philip V as king of Spain and continues the war alone on the upper Rhine. Within nine months the financial and military reality is plain: without British and Dutch subsidies Charles VI cannot sustain a campaign against an unburdened France. Eugene of Savoy and Villars, who have faced each other across the Rhineland for years, are sent to negotiate without their respective foreign ministries. They meet at Rastatt and Baden-Baden over the winter of 1713 to 1714. The text is drafted in French, the first major imperial treaty for which Latin is set aside. The diplomatic prestige of the Empire takes a small but symbolic blow at the level of the language itself. What Rastatt Confirms The substance is mostly an acceptance of Utrecht's distributions. Charles VI receives the former Spanish Netherlands (now the Austrian Netherlands), Milan, Naples, Sardinia, and the Tuscan ports. France keeps Strasbourg, Landau, and a strong position on the Rhine; the Wittelsbach electors of Bavaria and Cologne, who had sided with France, are restored to their lands. Philip V is, by absence rather than by named recognition, accepted as king of Spain. A separate Treaty of Baden in September 1714 is signed by the Empire as a whole, and stages the same outcome in Latin for the imperial record. The episode confirms a pattern visible at Münster and Osnabrück sixty-six years earlier: the Holy Roman Empire as a coordinated diplomatic actor is essentially ceremonial. The substantive treaty is negotiated by its largest member, Austria, in its own dynastic interest; the imperial signature is added afterwards. The Westphalian principle that princes are sovereign within their territories has, for the Empire itself, become indistinguishable from dissolution.
- — The Diplomatic Revolution. Wenzel Anton von Kaunitz-Rietberg, Austrian chancellor and architect of the 1756 Franco-Austrian rapprochement. Place: Château de Versailles, Kingdom of France Figures: Wenzel Anton, Prince von Kaunitz-Rietberg, Austrian chancellor, the architect · Abbé Bernis, French foreign minister · Maria Theresa of Austria · Madame de Pompadour, intermediary at Versailles Two and a Half Centuries Inverted Habsburg and Bourbon have fought each other since Charles V and Francis I in the 1520s. The opposition is the deep structure of European politics: Westphalia (1648), the Spanish Succession (1701 to 1714), the Polish Succession (1733 to 1738), the Austrian Succession (1740 to 1748) are all variations on it. Kaunitz, ambassador to Versailles from 1750 and chancellor from 1753, becomes convinced that the deep structure is the problem. Maria Theresa wants Silesia back from Prussia, which Frederick II seized in 1740. To take it she needs a continental coalition; the obvious partners are the Bourbon courts. Kaunitz's project is to persuade Louis XV to drop a 250-year alliance pattern with Prussia and the German Protestants and to ally instead with Austria. The Convention of Westminster, an Anglo-Prussian treaty signed in January 1756 to neutralize Hanover, provides the pretext. The Treaty of Versailles, signed on 1 May 1756, is the result: France and Austria pledge defensive support. The System Reveals Itself Within a year a second Treaty of Versailles makes the alliance offensive. France commits 100,000 troops and a large subsidy; Austria's war for Silesia becomes a French war as well. Russia under Elizabeth joins the Franco-Austrian side. Britain and Hanover join the Prussian. Sweden and most German states fall in behind the larger coalition. Within twelve months the alignment of European powers has been inverted in nearly every direction. Two things are revealed. First, the Westphalian system is genuinely indifferent to confession: a Bourbon-Habsburg alliance against a Protestant Prussia, backed by Orthodox Russia and Lutheran Sweden, is now possible without anyone pretending it has a religious shape. Second, the system is infinitely reconfigurable on instrumental grounds. Alliances follow interest, calculated treaty by treaty; the longue durée of dynastic enmity is, when sufficient pressure is applied, just policy. The Concert of Europe at Vienna sixty years later will inherit both of these lessons. Video: House of History on the 1756 reversal of alliances that put Austria with France and Britain with Prussia, the inversion that made the Seven Years' War possible.
- — The Seven Years' War Begins. Frederick the Great after the Battle of Kolin, 1757, by Julius Schrader. Place: Atlantic Ocean; Saxony; the Ohio Valley; Bengal; Senegal; the Philippines Figures: Frederick II of Prussia, opening the continental front · William Pitt the Elder, British war minister from 1757 · Robert Clive, in Bengal · the Marquis de Montcalm, in Canada The First Truly Global War Skirmishes between French and British colonial forces in the Ohio Valley have been running since 1754, where a young Virginian named George Washington fires the opening shots at Jumonville Glen. The diplomatic revolution at Versailles in May 1756 (see [[diplomatic-revolution-1756]]) turns a colonial scuffle into a continental alignment. Britain declares war on France on 17 May. Frederick II, anticipating attack from the new Franco-Austrian-Russian coalition, invades neutral Saxony on 29 August to seize its army and treasury preemptively. Within a year the war has theatres in Europe (Saxony, Bohemia, Westphalia, Pomerania), North America (where the colonists call it the French and Indian War), the Caribbean (Guadeloupe, Martinique, Havana), West Africa (Senegal), India (Bengal, the Carnatic), and the Philippines (the British capture of Manila in 1762). Naval engagements run from the English Channel to Quiberon Bay to Lagos to the Coromandel Coast. Westphalia Goes Intercontinental Roughly a million people die. The cost is borne by states whose tax base is the Westphalian sovereign's domestic subjects: Britain's national debt doubles; France's chronic fiscal crisis becomes terminal and produces, by 1789, the conditions for the Estates-General; Prussia survives only because Tsarina Elizabeth dies in January 1762 and her successor Peter III withdraws Russian forces from the war out of personal admiration for Frederick (the so-called Miracle of the House of Brandenburg). The war demonstrates that the Westphalian sovereign-state model, with its standing armies, its centralized treasuries, its tax and credit machinery, is now scalable to the planet. A war fought in Saxony has consequences in Pondicherry. The Peace of Paris (see [[treaty-of-paris-1763]]) will redraw the map of three continents. From this war forward, European peace treaties are also intercontinental treaties; the sovereign state's reach is, by demonstration, oceanic. Video: John Green on the Seven Years' War as the first truly global conflict, fought across four continents from 1756.
- — Vattel Publishes Le Droit des gens. Emer de Vattel (1714 to 1767), author of Le Droit des gens, published 1758. Place: Neuchâtel, Prussian principality in the Swiss cantons Figures: Emer de Vattel, Neuchâtel jurist in Saxon service · Christian Wolff, whose Jus Gentium Vattel reframes for a wider audience · Frederick II of Prussia, technical sovereign of Neuchâtel and dedicatee of the work The Textbook of the System Hugo Grotius had written De Jure Belli ac Pacis in 1625 in Latin, for a learned readership. Samuel von Pufendorf had followed with De Jure Naturae et Gentium in 1672. Christian Wolff had produced a vast and unreadable Latin Jus Gentium Methodo Scientifica Pertractatum in 1749. Emer de Vattel, a Neuchâtel diplomat in the service of the Elector of Saxony, takes the Wolffian system, prunes its scholasticism, writes it in clear French, and titles it Le Droit des gens, ou Principes de la loi naturelle appliqués à la conduite et aux affaires des nations et des souverains. Published at Neuchâtel in 1758, the book is at once the most cited treatise on international law in the second half of the eighteenth century. It is the first comprehensive work to take the post-Westphalian sovereign state, as it actually exists in 1758, as the basic unit of analysis. What Vattel Codifies Three propositions structure the work. First, the sovereign equality of states: une petite république n'est pas moins un État souverain que le plus puissant royaume. A small republic is no less a sovereign state than the most powerful kingdom. Second, non-intervention: it does not belong to any foreign power to take cognizance of the administration of any other sovereign. Third, the rights of neutrals in time of war, including freedom of commerce subject to contraband restrictions. American revolutionaries quote Vattel by name in the debates of the 1770s and 1780s. Benjamin Franklin orders three copies for the Continental Congress. Chief Justice John Marshall cites him repeatedly. Lincoln is said to keep The Law of Nations on his desk through the Civil War. Latin American independence movements read him in Spanish translation. The Westphalian principle of 1648 acquires, at Neuchâtel in 1758, a textbook that travels with the diplomatic bag of every new sovereign state for the next 150 years.
- — The Treaty of Paris. First page of the Treaty of Paris, 10 February 1763, between France, Great Britain, and Spain. Place: Hôtel de Grimaldi, Paris Figures: the Duc de Choiseul, French foreign minister · the Duke of Bedford, British plenipotentiary · the Marquis de Grimaldi, Spanish ambassador · William Pitt the Elder, opposing the terms in Parliament Three Continents at One Table Negotiations begin in autumn 1762, after British arms have taken Canada (1759 to 1760), Havana (August 1762), and Manila (October 1762). Choiseul prefers to recover the sugar islands (Guadeloupe and Martinique, whose annual yield exceeds Canada's by an order of magnitude) and to cede the snow. Bedford accepts: Britain takes Canada, all French territory east of the Mississippi except New Orleans, Florida (ceded by Spain in exchange for the recovery of Havana), Senegal, Tobago, Saint Vincent, Dominica, Grenada, and the bulk of French factories in India. France retains Saint-Domingue, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Saint Lucia, the right to fish off Newfoundland, and (under the secret Treaty of Fontainebleau the previous November) cedes Louisiana west of the Mississippi to Spain in compensation for the latter's losses. Spain recovers Cuba and the Philippines; France abandons most of its first overseas empire. Empire Consolidated, Revolution Seeded Britain emerges as the first global empire of the modern type: maritime, commercial, organized around a metropolitan core whose navy can be in two oceans at once. The Royal Navy's establishment grows to over 100 ships of the line. The East India Company, in the wake of Plassey (1757) and the wartime conquest of Bengal, will collect revenue from 30 million subjects within a decade. The Westphalian sovereign state has demonstrably scaled to intercontinental dimensions. The cost is fiscal. Britain's debt at the end of the war stands at £130 million, the largest of any state in history to that date. Servicing it requires new revenue, which Parliament looks for in the lightly-taxed American colonies. The Sugar Act of 1764, the Stamp Act of 1765, the Townshend duties of 1767, and the Tea Act of 1773 all follow directly. The conditions for the American Declaration of Independence (see [[american-declaration-of-independence-1776]]) are constituted within the same treaty that constitutes the British global empire. The two are causally inseparable.
- — The First Partition of Poland. Rejtan, or the Fall of Poland, by Jan Matejko (1866), depicting Tadeusz Rejtan's protest against the First Partition. Place: St Petersburg (treaty signed); Warsaw (Sejm forced to ratify, 30 September 1773) Figures: Catherine II of Russia · Frederick II of Prussia · Maria Theresa of Austria, signing in tears · Stanisław August Poniatowski, king of Poland, presiding over the ratifying Sejm Consuming a State by Treaty The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the mid-eighteenth century is the third-largest state in Europe by territory, with a population approaching twelve million, an elective monarchy, and a parliament (the Sejm) so jealously protective of noble privilege that any single deputy can dissolve it by invoking the liberum veto. Russia has effectively dominated Polish politics since 1717, but full annexation would force a war with Austria and Prussia. Frederick II proposes the alternative: each of the three neighboring powers takes a slice. Russia 92,000 km² (confirmed). Austria figure should be 83,000 km² per Wikipedia (First Partition of Poland), not 81,900. Prussia 36,000 km² (Wikipedia) vs. 36,300 in moment — within rounding tolerance. (Royal Prussia, minus Danzig and Thorn, joining Brandenburg to East Prussia). Territory ~30% confirmed (Wikipedia: 211,000 km² out of total). Population: Wikipedia gives 'roughly one-third' (~33%), not 35%. Suggest changing 'thirty-five percent' to 'one-third' or 'about a third.' without a war. The treaty is signed at St Petersburg on 5 August 1772; the Sejm, under occupation, ratifies it the following year. The Limit Case of the System The partition is the first major Westphalian-era violation of one sovereign state's territorial integrity by other sovereign states acting in concert. Vattel had been published fourteen years earlier (see [[de-vattel-publishes-1758]]); the principle of non-intervention is on every chancery shelf. The three powers justify the act with documents asserting historic claims to the seized territories. No European state intervenes. Frederick the Great calls the operation consuming Poland leaf by leaf, like an artichoke. Two further partitions follow (1793 between Russia and Prussia; 1795 between all three), and by 1795 Poland-Lithuania has ceased to exist as a sovereign state, not to return until 1918. The episode reveals the system's structural limit: balance-of-power diplomacy, in the absence of any enforcement mechanism above the Great Powers, can produce coordinated extinction of weaker sovereigns. The lesson is studied: in the Crimean settlement (1856), at Vienna (1815), and at Versailles (1919), small powers will demand explicit guarantees against partition by concert.
- — The Wealth of Nations. Adam Smith, author of An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 1776. Place: London (W. Strahan and T. Cadell); written largely at Kirkcaldy, Fife Figures: Adam Smith, Glasgow professor of moral philosophy · David Hume, dying that summer, who has read most of it in manuscript An Inquiry into Causes Smith has spent roughly ten years on the manuscript, much of it at his mother's house in Kirkcaldy on the Fife coast. The full title is An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. The first edition runs to two quarto volumes and roughly 950 pages. The first printing sells out within six months despite a price (£1.16s.) that buys a labourer two weeks' food. The argument is structured against the prevailing mercantilist orthodoxy, in which wealth is bullion, the bullion stock of a state is increased by maintaining a favourable trade balance, and the favourable trade balance is maintained by tariffs, charters, monopolies, and the close coordination of commerce with the sovereign's foreign policy. Smith argues that wealth is not bullion but the annual produce of labour, that the division of labour increases that produce, that the division of labour is limited by the extent of the market, and that the extent of the market is enlarged by free exchange. The Sovereign Steps Back The implication for the Westphalian sovereign is direct and uncomfortable. The mercantilist sovereign of Colbert's pattern, who charters the East India Company, taxes imported textiles, subsidizes exports, and prosecutes commercial war on his neighbours, is, on Smith's analysis, mistaking sovereign interest for sovereign aggrandizement. Commerce flourishes across borders when sovereigns get out of the way. The book is published exactly four months before the American Declaration of Independence (see [[american-declaration-of-independence-1776]]); Smith uses the colonial question as a long worked example in Book IV. Read alongside Vattel (see [[de-vattel-publishes-1758]]), the post-Westphalian century has now produced its two foundational textbooks: a legal handbook for the sovereign state's external conduct, and an economic case for restricting that conduct in the commercial sphere. The argument over which of these two has the better claim on sovereign attention will animate every subsequent generation. Cobden and Bright will quote Smith against Palmerston; the Bretton Woods architects will quote him against autarky; the WTO will quote him against tariffs; the post-2008 critics wil Video: Dr Craig Smith of Glasgow on Adam Smith and the 1776 Wealth of Nations, given at the Adam Smith tercentenary.
- — The American Declaration of Independence. Declaration of Independence, by John Trumbull (1818). United States Capitol Rotunda. Place: Pennsylvania State House (Independence Hall), Philadelphia Figures: Thomas Jefferson, principal drafter · John Adams · Benjamin Franklin · the Second Continental Congress, fifty-six signers across August A Claim Before a Capability The Continental Congress has been at war with British forces since Lexington and Concord in April 1775. Independence is debated through the spring of 1776 and resolved on 2 July with twelve colonies voting yes and New York abstaining. The text, drafted by Jefferson and revised by Adams, Franklin, and the Congress itself, is adopted on 4 July. Its substantive paragraph is unprecedented in international law. The United Colonies are declared Free and Independent States, possessing full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. The signers are aware that they are claiming a status they do not yet possess: the British army holds New York within a month, Philadelphia within fourteen months. The declaration is a performative bid for membership in the Westphalian system, issued before the bidder has the means to enforce it. Westphalian Principle Against the Westphalian Hegemon The list of grievances against George III is structured as a bill of indictment for the violation of constitutional sovereignty in the Whig sense (see [[glorious-revolution-1688]]): the king has dissolved colonial legislatures, quartered standing armies in peacetime, imposed taxes without consent, transported subjects for trial overseas. The argument is that the British Crown has itself broken the post-1688 settlement, and that the colonies, in declaring independence, are defending the principle rather than abandoning it. France, which has been quietly supplying powder and weapons since 1775, makes the alliance formal on 6 February 1778 after Saratoga. Spain follows in 1779; the United Provinces in 1780. The Westphalian system absorbs its first major non-European member. The principle of sovereign equality, which Vattel had codified twenty years earlier, is deployed in 1776 against the system's leading power, by colonists who quote Vattel and the English Whigs in the same paragraphs. The British recognition (see [[treaty-of-paris-1783]]) seven years later confirms the bid.
- — Catherine Annexes Crimea. Catherine II of Russia, by Johann Baptist Lampi the Elder, 1780s. Kunsthistorisches Museum. Place: Karasubazar (later Belogorsk), Crimean peninsula; manifesto issued at St Petersburg Figures: Catherine II of Russia · Grigory Potemkin, governor of New Russia, organizing the annexation on the ground · Şahin Giray, last khan of Crimea, pensioned then exiled then executed by the Ottomans · Abdul Hamid I, Ottoman sultan From Suzerainty to Sovereignty by Decree The Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca in 1774 had detached the Crimean Khanate from Ottoman suzerainty and made it nominally independent, with Russia recognized as protector. For nine years a sequence of pro-Russian and pro-Ottoman khans alternate; Şahin Giray, the Russian client, cannot pacify the peninsula. By the spring of 1783, Potemkin's troops are in occupation; Catherine signs the annexation manifesto on 8 April; Şahin Giray abdicates; the khanate's notables swear allegiance to the Russian Crown at Karasubazar on 9 July. The Ottoman Porte protests but does not fight. France and Austria, in conferences over the previous winter, have indicated they will not intervene. The system is again silent: a sovereign Muslim polity of three centuries' standing, recognized by treaty nine years earlier, is absorbed by treaty-less manifesto, and no European chancery objects in writing. A Claim Repeated in Two Centuries Russia takes the Black Sea coast from the Dniester to the Caucasus, the basis for the new naval base at Sevastopol (founded 1783), the city of Yekaterinoslav, the colonization of New Russia. The Tatar population emigrates in waves over the next century: an estimated 800,000 leave for the Ottoman lands between 1783 and 1922. The peninsula's demography is reshaped by Russian, Ukrainian, German, and Bulgarian settlement. The 1783 manifesto also produces an enduring rhetorical claim, repeated by every Russian government with an interest in restating it. Crimea is, on this argument, Russian by historic right of conquest and settlement; its inhabitants are Russians; its detachment under Khrushchev in 1954 was an administrative anomaly. The argument is rehearsed verbatim by Vladimir Putin in his March 2014 annexation speech and again in his February 2022 declaration (see [[invasion-of-ukraine-2022]]). The 1772 partition (see [[first-partition-of-poland-1772]]) and the 1783 Crimean manifesto, written eleven years apart by the same monarch, establish a method that Westphalian-era Russia will continue to apply.
- — The Treaty of Paris. American Commissioners of the Preliminary Peace Negotiations with Great Britain, by Benjamin West, 1783 to 1784. The British delegation refused to sit; the painting is unfinished. Place: Hôtel d'York, rue Jacob, Paris Figures: Benjamin Franklin · John Adams · John Jay · Henry Laurens · David Hartley, for Great Britain Britain Recognizes a Continent Preliminary articles are signed at Paris on 30 November 1782; the definitive treaty follows on 3 September 1783, the same day as the parallel treaties of Versailles between Britain and France and Britain and Spain. Article 1 is the substantive line: His Britannic Majesty acknowledges the said United States, viz. New Hampshire, Massachusetts Bay, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, to be free, sovereign and independent states. The territorial settlement is generous to the United States: the western boundary at the Mississippi, the northern boundary roughly along the present Canadian line, the southern at the 31st parallel. Britain retains Canada, regains Senegal-side concessions, returns Florida to Spain, returns Tobago to France. The seven-year war has cost about £100 million; Britain accepts the loss of thirteen colonies and the continued possession of Canada and the Caribbean sugar islands as the consolation. The System Acquires Its First Non-European Member The Westphalian family of states, which since 1648 has expanded chiefly by recognizing existing European entities (Dutch Republic, Swiss Confederation, eventually Sweden and Russia) and by reorganizing them at treaty conferences, here for the first time admits a wholly new polity from outside Europe, constituted by revolution against an existing member. The American case becomes the template: a colonial population claims sovereign status, secures recognition by a European Great Power (France, then others), defeats the metropolitan power militarily, and is recognized in the resulting peace. Within fifty years the template will be applied across the Americas: Haiti (1804), the Spanish American republics (1810s and 1820s), Brazil (1822). The number of sovereign states recognized in the Westphalian system, which had been hovering around twenty European entities for most of the eighteenth century, more than doubles by the 1830s. The thirteen American states themselves write a federal constitution four years later, declaring their thirteen sovereignties to be one. The next century and a half of debate over what sovereignty can be pooled, divided, federated, and surrendered begins at Phil Video: Ken Burns' Benjamin Franklin on the 1783 Treaty of Paris that recognised the United States, negotiated by Franklin, Adams, and Jay.
