A Richness of Martens II

A note about my post A Richness of Martens.

I've just noticed in Jennifer Mori's latest book, The culture of Diplomacy: Britain in Europe, c.1750-1830 a reference to G.F. Martens' Summary of the Law of Nations. It's an interesting reference that's reminded me why I'm interested in the general sweep of international political and diplomatic history.

She says that an early-nineteenth century English diplomat, James Justinian (known to his family as Jem), commented that he wanted to get another edition of Martens as the 1795 English edition he owned

had been translated into English by "that rogue [William] Cobbett..."

She continues by making a comment on how we can see what contemporary diplomats thought about international relations by looking at the ideas contained in the books they owned. In Jem's case, this edition of Martens and Vattel's Law of Nations. These books, she says, 'both presented the European community as a system of states bound together by an enlightened self-interest that drove its members to co-operate with each other, even in times of war. Utility, rather than civility or abstract morality, was therefore the invisible hand at the heart of international relations...'

It's a good point, one that academic historians tend to forget repeatedly and which I've been waiting quite a long time to hear. Rather than being a mechanism that was formed solely as an extension or expression of competitiveness, mutual suspicion and Machiavellian agitation between states, the formation of systems of diplomacy should be interpreted as doing fundamentally useful things in the moderation of politics between states. Not taking this idea at least on board, and academics run the risk of relegating the diplomat  to being performer in the meaningless rituals of courtly life or, at worst, as little more than a spy.  It's  a point one that I've been thinking about ever since I decided that diplomatic history of the early modern period has been not sufficiently studied. Or, I think sometimes, that when it has been studied, it's been looked at the wrong way.

You can download a copy of Cobbett's translation of Martens from google books here. And even if I'm never going to read any of the books that archive.org have about and by Cobbett, how can I resist a link to them?