The Treaties of Utrecht and the Making of the British Empire, 1713-1783

In this dissertation I investigate a seemingly simple question with significant implications for our understanding of diplomacy and international law: just when and how does a treaty happen? My doctoral dissertation offers one answer by examining the relationship between European peace treaties and British overseas empire-building through a close study of the colonial dimensions of the 1713 Treaties of Utrecht. Traditional scholarship primarily frames colonial peace-making between Britain, France, and Spain in the long eighteenth century as a process that began and ended in continental Europe, even as historians consistently acknowledge the important implications of major peace accords like Utrecht for overseas empire-building. I disrupt this narrative by redirecting the historical focus away from the Utrecht peace conference and toward the implementation of the treaties in British colonies overseas, tracing its impact in colonial territories in the Western Mediterranean, Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Atlantic northeast.

To guide my archival research at the National Archives at Kew and the British Library in London, I applied a three-pronged approach to the Treaties of Utrecht that drew on the concept of textual-geography as defined by historical geographers and historians of the book: a close-reading of the treaties’ language, a consideration of their materiality and mobility as historical objects, and a study of the varied types of documents British and other European officials used to implement the treaties, such as royal commissions, oaths, and surveys. By identifying the “textual trails” of Utrecht across the British empire, I could more effectively illuminate the imperial communication networks that circulated its claims, and thus how British colonial officials operationalized it. But crucially, a closer look at these records reveals that a much wider range of interests beyond the British brought the treaties to life. As opposed to British officials directly imposing the terms of Utrecht on other settler and Indigenous populations, the meaning of the treaties evolved over time through the diplomatic interplay between British agents with other colonial officials, local French and Spanish settlers, and Indigenous communities.

Ultimately, this project reconceptualizes the relationship between British empire-building and the Treaties of Utrecht by emphasizing the multidirectional characteristics of treaty-making in the early modern world, arguing that the realization of Utrecht was contested, multivalent, and non-linear. This scholarship moves beyond the traditional conception of the peace treaty in Europe as a discretely bound agreement that produced (or failed to produce) particular outcomes, and instead redefines it as a complex nexus of legal claims that evolved over decades in keeping with the political and economic ambitions of both European and Indigenous actors.