The Law of Nations and the Rules of Gentility

“We are a young Nation & have a character to establish,” wrote George Washington in 1783. “If we do not fulfil our public engagements... [and] religiously observe our Treaties... in what light shall we be considered?” This paper uses Washington's remark, and many others like it made during the decades of the new republic's founding, to analyse the relationship between eighteenth-century gentility and the emerging international legal order.

In an increasingly interconnected commercial world, national sovereignty had to be considered in the light of transnational flows of trade and finance. Gentlemen merchants needed international law to protect their enterprises and their property. They also relied upon established rules of conduct among themselves. But the democratic potential catalysed by the American Revolution, and later the French, put at risk the delicate ecosystem of mercantile regulation and international property-rights. From the 1780s onward, gentlemen of commerce had to make new arguments about the way law worked, and the limits that it placed on newly independent states and their democracies.

Figuring the new republic as a gentleman in its own right, actors like Washington, Hamilton, and Jay turned themselves into interpreters of sovereign gentility, defenders of their nation's character. In the process, they helped construct a liberal and commercial transatlantic ideal that would continue, in the nineteenth century, to offer an alternative to national and democratic revolutionary movements.