By centring settler colonialism and primitive accumulation, we can now see why Vattel’s treatise was so uniquely beneficial in making an international legal case for American revolutionary popular will. Vattel’s influence on the American Founders is well documented, with the latest study dating his treatise’s reception
46 Ince 2018a, 900-901.
47 Rosenberg 1994, 166.
48 Ibid. 144-146.
back to 1762 (only four years after its first publication).49 Such influence is iconi-cally encapsulated in the much-quoted remark of Benjamin Franklin who, upon re-ceiving the most recent copy of The Law of Nations from a friend in Amsterdam stated that: ‘I am much obliged by the kind present you have made of us of your new edition of Vattel. It came to us in good season, when the circumstances of a rising state made it necessary frequently to consult the law of nations.’50 While Vat-tel’s impact was in no way limited to colonial America, its veneration there stood in contrast to the scepticism it invoked amongst various Europeans.51 In the words of Vincent Chetail: ‘one can assert without too much exaggeration that the praise for his work in the United States was inversely proportioned to the criticism it re-ceived in Europe.’52 Moreover, Vattel’s American reception was not simply a mat-ter of random availability. The American founders were certainly familiar with other canonical publicists, especially Grotius and Pufendorf.53
When accounting for Vattel’s reception in the American colonies, one set of expla-nations focuses on how The Law of Nations was both intended as a practical guide for statesmen and presented a pluralistic view of popular will that was deeply com-patible with the ideals of the American founders.54 On the first point, the many pos-sible applications rooted in the sheer ambiguity of Vattel’s treatise allowed the American founders to render their iconoclastic republican agenda more or less leg-ible to existing sovereigns who continued to adhere to dynastic legitimacy.55 On the second point, unlike other publicists, Vattel explicitly claimed that ‘the people’
49 Oppispow and Gerber 2017.
50 Quoted in Chetail 2014, 254.
51 See Pitts 2018, 120-121.
52 Ibid. 252.
53 On the revelation of this point through archival research, see Richardson 2012, 549-550.
54 Chetail 2014, 266.
55 On ambiguity as the great strength of Vattel, see Ibid 267-269.
were the ultimate source of sovereign authority.56 Thus, by disavowing any remnant of dynastic legitimacy, Vattel’s ideologically plural, popular will-based law of na-tions allowed for procedural intercourse amongst those who nevertheless main-tained substantively opposing views on the nature of legal and political authority.57 On this basis, it played an indispensable role in allowing the novel American ex-periment in republican self-rule to assume its place ‘among the powers of the earth.’58 Applied to the American Revolution’s long-term transformative impact on international legal order’s approach to domestic authority, The Law of Nations can be viewed as the umbilicus between ‘Old Europe’ and a grand reconstruction of the world in the image of the United States.
While there is a great deal of truth to this line of explanation, failure to account for the deeper material realities surrounding it reproduces the ahistorical ‘American Exceptionalism’ narrative. This in turn distorts the American Revolution’s role in materially entrenching popular will as the international legal basis for domestic au-thority. In recalling how the interlinked phenomena of settler colonialism and prim-itive accumulation expand our analytical horizons, we find a new framework for understanding Vattel’s treatise as the ideal manual for those asserting a conception of revolutionary liberty inseparable from colonial capitalism. As discussed in Chap-ter 2, Vattel was notable for denying land rights to those who did not engage in his preferred mode of agriculture. Far from simply being a ‘product of its time,’ The Law of Nations was unapologetic in its delivery of a definitive answer to questions of colonial ownership, despite the moral struggles of many of Vattel’s contempo-raries regarding the justice of these practices.59 Given the imperative of indigenous
56 Grotius, Pufendorf, and Wolf, were far more ambivalent on this issue, see Reeves 1909, 552-553.
57 As discussed in Chapter II, Vattel did not condemn monarchies as illegitimate, but rather recon-figured their basis of authority as an attenuated expression of popular will made evident by the tangible fact of their existence without contestation.
58 See Gould 2012a.
59 See Chapter II, Part 2.6.2.2.
dispossession in the political economy of American settler expansion, Vattel’s trea-tise was consistent with the material aims of the American founders in a manner unshared by other canonical texts. Most importantly, while Vattel was not the only normative theorist of settler colonialization to influence the American revolutionary context (John Locke was preeminent in this capacity), he was able to uniquely sit-uate these particular social relations within a pragmatic theory of international legal justification.60
In working from the premise that colonial capitalism was integral to emergence of modern popular will, and a major milestone was the American reception of Vattel’s treatise, questions are raised regarding the world-historical context of this develop-ment. After all, the material processes discussed above were constituted on a spatial and temporal scale that far-exceeded the immediate scope of the American Revo-lution. Coming to term with this requires nothing short of an account of the longue durée of European overseas expansion where rival modes of political economy clashed, new opportunities for colonization emerged, and shifting international le-gal justifications were present at every step of the way. The popular will-based transformation of the international legal order through the American revolutionary invocation of Vattel did not emerge in a void. It erupted as the resolution to numer-ous contradictions of legal and political authority that were interconnected by-prod-ucts of colonial capitalism. Understanding this dynamic requires us to account for the intertwined material contexts of the pre-existing order of dynastic feudalism that the American Revolution challenged, as well as the emerging colonial capitalist order the American Revolution helped to fulfil.