'The Labyrinth of Treaties, 1712-1763'. International Law Behind the Scenes of Early Enlightenment Diplomacy.

Objective

The past of international law (the law produced and applicable between polities) is studied from various disciplinary perspectives. Our scholarly image prior to 1870 mainly rests on accounts of philosophy and theory, or the published final product of negotiations, treaties. This image ought to be corrected. International law is continuously produced and interpreted by the actors. The advisory work of Nicolas-Louis Le Dran (1687- 1774), top civil servant in the forerunner of the French Foreign Ministry (bureaux des affaires étrangères) contains hundreds of substantial works drawn up on the basis of diplomatic correspondence and treaties, but also doctrine. Le Dran composed forward-looking advice for political decision makers. Preceding state behaviour and sources of law were the cornerstones of his judgement. This corpus is of an exceptional size, deterring many researchers. TREATYLAB is not a laboratory of treaties, but rather a team charting the labyrinth of documents underpinning and interpreting end-products as well as the daily practice of negotiation. Classical in-depth close reading will be both accelerated and enhanced by TREATYLAB’s critical and measured digitisation, building on the experience of Digital Enlightenment Studies and an external partner. The TREATYLAB team will digitize 112 000 folios from the French diplomatic archives and engage in Named Entity Recognition. The contribution to science will thus be twofold: a tagged transcription of the “Mountain of Paper” produced, as well as collective and individual analyses of Le Dran’s team’s preparatory work behind the scenes. The project will engage with the debate on international legal history as spurred recently by The Cambridge History of International Law and Martti Koskenniemi’s To The Uttermost Parts of the Earth, on two tracks: drawing insights from the materiality of practices, rather than sweeping big theories, and incorporating hidden strategic knowledge in the discipline’s narrative.