Muddying the History of International Law: Ottoman Legal World-Making Through the Danube and Congo Rivers

The nineteenth century marked a decisive phase for the internationalization of legal sovereignty. This paper examines how the Ottoman Empire co-created and strategically leveraged this shift in international law as a middle power within a hierarchical international legal order. With the Treaty of Paris (1856), which put freedom of navigation on the Danube under the protection of the ‘Public Law of Europe,’ the supranational European Danube Commission gained international administrative authority over the mouth of the Danube to regulate the river for commerce for all states. The Berlin Treaty’s General Act (1885) similarly emphasized trade and ‘civilization’ and stipulated free navigation for all states on the Congo river. Whereas the Danube Commission is often read as a technocratic step toward European integration, the Berlin Conference is remembered for legitimizing the scramble for Africa.

In contrast, I argue that Ottoman actors were not merely objects of European legal expansion, but active participants and negotiators of international norms. I focus on the works of two high-ranking Ottoman bureaucrats, Mehmed Said Pasha and Etienne Carathéodory, who played crucial roles in shaping the internationalization of the two rivers. Both served as commissioners of the European Commission of the Danube in the 1870s. Mehmed Said Pasha later acted as plenipotentiary at the Berlin Conference, while Etienne Carathéodory served as envoy extraordinary to Belgium and as an associate member of the Institut de Droit International. The history of the internationalization of the two rivers highlights the need for critical histories of international law, that move beyond the predominant focus in the literature on textbooks of international law and Great power politics. Foregrounding the practice of Ottoman bureaucrats deepens our understanding of the historically contextual making of sovereignty and international law itself.