Description
The Congress of Soissons assembled in 1728 to accommodate various pending claims between European sovereigns and prevent an all-out war. It was cited by Emer de Vattel’s Droit des Gens as an “ennuyeuse comédie”, because the multilateral talks did not generate a formal treaty. When we abandon the perspective of a peace treaty between states and focus on the sources produced by the ministers plenipotentiary and their secretaries, we are able discern a precious testimony of legal argumentation involving private interests in an imperial and global context. My paper focuses on two contentious issues: the protection of French, British and Dutch assets on Spanish galleons sailing back from the Americas (I) and the fate of the suspended Imperial East India Company founded in Ostend (II), which provided the ius ad bellum-justification at the heart of the former quarrel. Inspired by the recent work of Ed Jones Corredera, Martti Koskenniemi and the new diplomatic history of Lucien Bély, the legal discourse on competing commercial interests in the European culture of peace engineering (Stella Ghervas) or peace-keeping (Johannes Burkhardt) at the dawn of the Age of Enlightenment can become visible. My full article (107 p.) can be consulted on https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4140705.| Period | 23 Jun 2022 |
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| Event title | 6th Biennial Conference of the European Society for Comparative Legal History |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Lissabon, Portugal |
| Degree of Recognition | International |