Treaty-Making Projects and the Rise of the Everyday Treaty

Abstract States today are typically enmeshed in dense networks of numerous treaties that define their obligations toward one another, but this was not always the case. This originated in the nineteenth century, when the frequency of treaty-making increased dramatically. I call this the rise of the “everyday” treaty, and present a new empirical historical analysis of how it came about. Rather than a general “turn to treaties,” during the middle decades of the nineteenth century (from 1820 to 1860), the intensification of treaty-making was largely due to the activities of a small group of five or six actors, who pursued “treaty-making projects” to control international relations on a particular issue or in a geographical region. The essay suggests that this shows the importance of treaties as a flexible and instrumental tool for statecraft, and identifies some key areas for further research on the topic.