The Marine Origins of Contemporary Warfare

I would like to draw a genealogy of Donald Trump's rhetoric and military action in Venezuela and Iran, in particular, of how the acquisition of the resources of another country through a military operation and the disregard of any framework of international law are deemed justifiable. Apart from a broadly conceived inherent right of conquest, this defence has a particular precedent in the way (English/British) royal prerogative and (English/British) royal Prize charters provided a framework for the East India Company to treaty, conquer and acquire properties in the subcontinent, as argued in my recent book The King’s Plunder, The King’s Bodies (2023). Prize law was an accepted form of ‘international’ law within the European-American world before and alongside the emergence of a discourse of international law, which, as many historians have argued, recognised the rights of conquest for ‘civilised’ states. Prize law, understudied in the scholarship, was one indication of the fact that there was a ‘law’ of conquest, something that was recognised and sought to be limited, if not annulled, only in the UN Charter of 1945. In this sense it must be understood that territorial integrity as a norm, howsoever the norm has been undermined in practice, is a very recent post-Second World War development, that is yet again being threatened in the contemporary conjuncture. A history of the relationship between British imperial conquests and Prize law highlights the longer view of the interrelations between the appropriation of properties and the indifference to life entailed in the rhetoric and practices of war.