Description
Member of PhD examination committee. Abstract of PhD thesis:Studies portraying the history of international law and empire in Africa still often take as their starting-point the Scramble for Africa which set in after the Conference of Berlin in 1884-1885. However, it was really during the first half of the nineteenth century that Western powers devised and experimented with the legal techniques that were used for the purposes of expansion during the late nineteenth century and that imperial networks were developed between Western agents and African indigenous people. This research examines the legal connections and regimes that developed between British imperial agents on the one hand and indigenous African communities living in West Africa on the other hand. It argues that international law was not merely imposed on African communities, but rather grew organically through a process of interaction and experimentation and therefore challenges the traditional narrative of the way Africa was drawn within the orbit of Western international law. In a political environment wherein British presence in West Africa was confined to a handful of settlements and forts and its official imperial aspirations were limited to facilitating and expanding commercial interaction a hybrid form of international law existed, which entailed aspects of both European notions of international law and African custom. Imperial international law was materially informed by Western cultural perceptions of West Africa and of the ‘African’. Furthermore, through the actions of British imperial agents early experiments were made in West Africa with international legal techniques of empire, such as extraterritorial jurisdiction, anti-slave trade treaties, use of force and the extension of protection to African communities that would come to play a crucial role during the late nineteenth-century Scramble for Africa.
| Period | 30 Sept 2016 |
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| Examinee | Inge Van Hulle |
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