The capitulatory sea: extraterritorial relations in the Mediterranean, 996-1937

Thesis

This thesis offers a new, interdisciplinary history of Mediterranean extraterritoriality, which allowed European merchant-nations to live according to their own laws (under consular jurisdiction) within Islamicate port-cities. Regulated by a body of charters or treaties known as the ahdnames, or the capitulations, I argue that the historiography of Mediterranean extraterritoriality has been distorted by its cooption and stigmatisation during the long nineteenth century, which helped to globalise the modern ideology of territorial sovereignty: the notion that sovereignty ought to be absolute, exclusive, and fixed within linear borders. Extraterritoriality, by the mid-nineteenth century, was an expression of western imperialism that designated the ‘semi-civilised’ status of Oriental polities, and scholarly representations of extraterritoriality still tend to see it through this lens; consular jurisdiction, no matter the period, is identified with western agency and the negation of local sovereignty. Contributing to a growing literature on multi-jurisdictional orders and interpolity zones, I show that capitulatory extraterritoriality originated in a very different context, owing as much, at first, to local state power as it did to merchant-capitalism. In tracing Mediterranean extraterritoriality back to its medieval origins, the thesis simultaneously develops a spatial-historical method for global IR, using a particular kind of building – the funduq, or fondaco, in which Latinate merchants were confined – to tell a much wider story about the global evolution of political sovereignty, commercial capitalism, and the modern international system.

On the one hand, then, the thesis reconstructs the capitulatory system as an interpolity order in its own right – one which helps to provincialise Westphalia and denaturalise territorial sovereignty. Contrapuntally, however, it shows how European polities were able to co-opt and Orientalise the capitulations, narrating the modernity of territorial sovereignty against the ‘anachronism‘ of capitulatory extraterritoriality. Drawing together historical sociology, diplomatic historiography, intellectual history, architecture, the history of quarantine, and the history of international law, this is the most wide-ranging account of Mediterranean extraterritoriality since its abolition in the early twentieth century.

Authors: Holcroft, S

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-xrky4ynqy
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: extraterritoriality; capitulations; ahdnames; fondaco; Orientalism; historical IR; legal pluralism; Mediterranean history
• Subjects: Interpolity Zones; Extraterritoriality; International relations and culture; Legal Pluralism; Mediterranean History