As Max Weber wrote in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, the essence of modern capitalism is its commitment to quotidian regularity, gradual accumulation, and the rule of law; but for these qualities, the ethos of the commercial bourgeoisie would be indistinguishable from that of the pre-modern brigand.  For Weber, the chief exemplar of capitalism's rational side was Benjamin Franklin.¹  Perhaps that is why historians have so eagerly sought modernity's roots in the western Atlantic, with the American colonies supplying what Robin Blackburn calls the "forced draught" of change in areas as varied as market discipline, social and racial hierarchies, and popular sovereignty and national identity.²  As Weber's juxtaposition suggests, however, modernity captures only one dimension of Britain's seventeenth and eighteenth-century expansion.  Whether we consider the founding of white colonies of settlement, the dispossession and enslavement of non-European populations, or the onset of the "age of democratic revolution," the British Atlantic's development was no less indebted to piracy and other forms of irregular violence, all of which Weber believed to be antithetical to both capitalist rationalism and, ultimately, modernity. 

            Taking as its focus the long century between the English Restoration and the aftermath of the American Revolution, this paper examines the implications of this double ethos for the legal geography of the English-speaking Atlantic.  In particular, it explores the interdependence between the British and American commitment to the rule of law, which both peoples took to be a benchmark of their own modernity, and the strongly held conviction that the western and southern Atlantic was a place of contested sovereignties, diminished legalities, and warring imperialisms.³  Simplistic, distorting, and offensive though the perception was, Britons regarded both Africa and the Americas as a zone distinct from Europe ã a region where even "law-abiding" peoples (metropolitan as well as creole) were free to engage in practices that were unacceptable in Europe.  Far from being a perspective unique to Britain, moreover, the notion that the extra-European Atlantic lay beyond the pale was shared by many Americans, and exerted a powerful influence over how they understood their own situation, both before and after the Revolution.  Even as the two English-speaking empires affirmed their own modernity, Weber's theoretically distinct categories of legal accumulation and lawless aggression remained explicitly intertwined in the wider Atlantic, and the ethos of both the British Empire and the United States continued to depend on their situation in a region where acts of impunity were the norm.

            This Anglo-American construction of the outer world presupposed the law-based character of international relations within Europe.  Despite the recent attention that scholars have paid to the xenophobic strands of Georgian patriotism, Britons everywhere tended to regard Europe as a zone of law and civility ã "the most civilized Quarter of the Globe," as an English pamphleteer wrote in 1743.⁴  In its account of the capitulation of the British garrison on Minorca in 1782, Edmund Burke's Annual Register made a point of noting the "kindness and tenderness" with which the French and Spanish treated the ragged defenders as they surrendered their arms.  "It has been assured," wrote the journal's anonymous correspondent, "that several of the common soldiers of both armies [i.e., of France and Spain], were so moved by the wretched condition of the garrison, that involuntary tears dropped from them as they passed."⁵  In extolling such humanitarian tendencies, Britons did not hesitate to claim a special role for themselves.  As an Irish pamphleteer observed in 1779, Europe's modern history would have been an unrelenting story of slavery and impoverishment, "but for the intervention of Great Britain."⁶  If the British were sure of their place in Europe's civilized consortium, however, they readily conceded that this commitment to the law of nations was not unique to them but was one manifestation of what the Swiss jurist Emmerich de Vattel called "the honour and humanity of the Europeans."⁷ 

            There was obviously an element of wishful thinking in this depiction of international relations, as anyone who had experienced warfare on the Continent could attest.  Not surprisingly, the British tended to be especially unforgiving of infractions by their mortal enemy France ã "the most Christian brute," as a pamphlet detailing French outrages in the Netherlands styled Louis XV during the 1740s.⁸  Yet even when European powers violated formal treaties and agreements, writers tended to assume at least a residual willingness to abide by the "humane customs of civilized nations," as Francis Hutcheson wrote in his system of moral philosophy, and many took such customs as a sign of broader historical trends.⁹  "Europe hath for above a century past been greatly enriched by commerce and polished by arts," observed East Apthorp, Anglican vicar of Croydon, in 1776.  "Whoever compares the present age with the last, will discern an almost total change to have taken place in the manners, customs, and the government of Christendom."¹⁰

            The law that underlay this progressive development was clearly a European construct, "a system of artificial jurisprudence," in the words of William Paley, based on the diplomatic customs and formal conventions of the Continent's principal powers.¹¹  Despite its cultural specificity, however, British jurists (in common with thinkers throughout Europe and America) held the law of nations to be universal, with norms that were as binding in the woodlands of North America as at Europe's center.  This was partly because of the need to regulate relations between the imperial powers of Europe and to prevent them from subjecting each other's colonists to what Bristol's Society of Merchant Venturers termed "uncivilized sistem[s] of war."¹²  In Britain's case, the notion of a global jurisprudence derived added force from the doctrine that settlers who emigrated overseas retained all the rights of natural-born subjects, including the full protection of both common law and the law of nations.  As William Blackstone noted in the Commentaries, the latter formed such a fundamental part of the British constitution that it was "adopted in it's full extent" wherever English law was in force.  Were the situation otherwise, wrote Blackstone, contracts between merchants would be worthless, foreign treaties would lose their force, and Britain could expect neither friendship nor mercy from other governments; in a word, its people "must cease to be a part of the civilized world."¹³

            This commitment to international law was readily apparent in the administration of Britain's overseas empire, including the sovereignty that Britain exercised on the high seas and the treaty rights it extended to conquered possessions with extensive Catholic and non-Christian populations, notably Quebec and Bengal.¹⁴  Of the British Empire's various parts, however, none appeared to be more securely within the pale of both the European law of nations and English common law than the colonies of settlement that stretched from Newfoundland to the Lesser Antilles.  In the words of the English radical John Wilkes, the colonies were such integral parts of the British nation that there was "no difference between an inhabitant of Boston in Lincolnshire, and of Boston in New England."¹⁵  Wilkes, of course, did not speak for all Britons.  Yet his formulation did not differ substantially from the one that the ministers of George III enshrined in the Royal Proclamation of 1763 and the American Stamp Act (1765).  Based on a line that followed the crest of the Appalachian Mountains, the Proclamation drew a sharp distinction between the Indian lands to the west and the colonies of settlement to the east and south, including Quebec, East and West Florida, and Grenada.  (See map 1.)  West of the Proclamation Line was international space where Britain's authority depended on treaties with "the several nations or tribes of Indians with whom we are connected"; on the other hand, the Proclamation recognized both the older colonies and Britain's new possessions (except Quebec) as common law polities, whose "laws, statutes and ordinances" should conform "as near as may be agreeable to the laws of England."¹⁶  As the Stamp Act showed, an important corollary to this greater British identity ã at least in British eyes ã was that Parliament could tax Britons in America on the same terms as it did Britons in England, Scotland, and Wales.¹⁷  Naturally, most colonists rejected Parliament's claims to fiscal supremacy; however, few questioned Thomas Whately's assertion that the "British Empire in Europe and in America [is] . . . the same Power" and that the "Mother Country" and the colonies were "one Nation."¹⁸  In the words of the assembly of Jamaica, there was no question that Britons in the colonies were "entitled to the benefit and protection of the laws of England and to the rights and privileges of Englishmen."¹⁹

	Map 1: European Possessions in North America and the Caribbean Area After the Peace of Paris, 1763. From Max Savelle, The Origins of American Diplomacy: The International History of Angloamerica, 1492-1763 (New York, 1967), 508.

            If the law afforded minimal safeguards to Britons everywhere, however, it served another, darker purpose, which was to legitimate a far less exacting conduct toward people beyond the pale of its protection, including, under certain circumstances, Europeans.  Indeed, into the early years of the eighteenth century, the British ã in common with the other maritime powers of Europe ã assumed that the law of nations, in particular, did not apply (or did not apply with equal force) in those parts of the world that lay beyond the so-called "lines of amity," the imaginary quadrant formed by the Tropic of Cancer and a prime meridian that bisected the Atlantic west of the Azores.  As developed by European adventurers during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the doctrine of autonomous spheres made it possible for Europeans to wage war in the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans, while maintaining peace (or "amity") in Europe.  Occasionally, governments reversed this relationship with wartime pacts of colonial neutrality, in effect permitting subjects beyond the line to pursue nonbelligerent activities that were (at least ostensibly) inimical to metropolitan interests.  More typically, though, Europeans recognized distinctions between the two zones by concluding "truce[s] to be observed in Europe" ã in the words of the seventeenth-century jurist Samuel Pufendorf ã while continuing hostilities "in the East or West Indies."²⁰  As Oliver Cromwell allegedly said on learning that English forces had captured French Acadia in 1655, it was well known that "everyone could act for his own advantage in those quarters."²¹

            The upshot was an international regime where Europe's maritime powers subscribed in varying degrees to the principle that "might makes right beyond the line," with governments tolerating or, on occasion, deliberately promoting extra-European acts of war and piracy even as they maintained cordial relations at home.  A vivid illustration of this dichotomy ã even after Britain agreed to end the practice in the Treaty of Madrid (1670) ã was the impunity with which English privateers preyed on Spanish shipping in the Caribbean, irrespective of whether a state of war existed between the two powers in Europe.²²  In the two decades following the Peace of Utrecht (1713), the concept of autonomous international spheres likewise enabled Britain and France to maintain cordial relations in Europe, while their colonists and Indian auxiliaries engaged in protracted warfare along the borders of northern New England and Nova Scotia.²³  Indeed, as late as the start of the so-called War of Jenkins' Ear (1739), English and American patriots assumed ã mistakenly, as it turned out ã that the British government could go to war with Spain in the West Indies without endangering the general peace of Europe.²⁴

            By middle decades of the eighteenth century, the doctrine of autonomous spheres was no longer a formally acknowledged part of European international relations in the extra-European Atlantic.²⁵  Nonetheless, three factors helped preserve the region's character as a zone of impunity at least partially distinct from Europe.  The first was the absence of clearly delineated, universally recognized European jurisdictions and boundaries, which enabled people on the margins of the great overseas empires to engage in local acts of violence and undeclared warfare.  To many Britons, the Atlantic Ocean provided the clearest example of this jurisdictional confusion ã and, often, chaos.  Not only were ships thought to be places of rough manners and casual violence, but the waters through which they sailed often lay beyond the control of even Europe's mightiest navies.²⁶  Despite the annual tribute that Britain paid to the Barbary States of North Africa, the possibility of being captured by Muslim corsairs remained the subject of particular interest, to say nothing of terror and fascination.²⁷  On other occasions, observers noted the maritime world's reputation for unconstrained masculine violence, as in Daniel Defoe's horrific tale about the twenty-one members of Captain Thomas Anstis's "brutish" crew who "successively" forced themselves on a female captive and "afterwards broke her Back and flung her into the Sea."²⁸  No doubt influenced by such stories, Anna Maria Falconbridge spent her first night on board the vessel that would carry her husband and her to Sierra Leone terrified "that a gang of pirates had attacked the ship, and would put us all to death."²⁹  Although often apocryphal or of dubious provenance, tales like this conveyed an obvious lesson.  Men and women who ventured beyond the waters of Europe abandoned many of the safeguards that the law afforded in metropolitan England.

            The violent tendencies of ambiguous and ineffective jurisdictions were also evident in what William Burke called the "savage" European propensity to contest "the Sovereignty of Deserts in America," both along the inland reaches of North America and in the Caribbean.³⁰  In British eyes, the most vexing of these disputes arose from Spain's claim to all lands and waters not explicitly ceded to other European powers ã what the bishop of Norwich ridiculed in 1739 as an absurd pretension to "absolute sovereignty in the American Seas."³¹  Although France's claims were less extensive, similar jurisdictional problems bedeviled Anglo-French relations in the West Indies and parts of North America.³²  Even Britain's overwhelming triumph during the Seven Years' War did not entirely resolve these conflicts.  In the British settlements on Honduras Bay, the mixed-raced inhabitants continued to worried about their own ambiguous status under the Anglo-Spanish Treaty of Paris (1763), which permitted them to cut logwood and mahogany for the British market while affirming Spain's sovereignty over the settlements themselves.³³  Not surprisingly, Britain continued to engage in brinkmanship and low-level hostilities throughout the region, notably with France over the contested status of the Turks Islands (1764) and Spain during the Falkland Islands crisis of 1770.³⁴ 

            Compounding the violence spawned by the wider Atlantic's overlapping claims and boundaries was the British Empire's loose-knit structure, which freed both "natural born" British colonists and subject peoples who were neither Protestant nor European to wage war without official sanction.  Once again, some of the clearest examples came from what Blackstone called Britain's "maritime state."³⁵  Speaking in 1746 of depredations by colonial "privateers in America and the West Indies," the Lords of the Admiralty claimed they were powerless to regulate such activities because the governors who commissioned them "alone have power to curb [their] insolencies."³⁶  As late as the 1790s, both friendly and neutral powers ã including, notably, the United States ã complained of the freelance depredations of West Indian privateers and the colonial prize courts that legitimated their irregularities.³⁷  On occasion, such autonomous acts of violence even spread to England's own ports and shores.  During the Liverpool seamen's strike of August 1775, some two thousand sailors idled by the Revolution's disruption of the slave trade seized firearms and cannon, destroyed the houses of several "obnoxious persons," and bombarded the Exchange.  One person "could not help thinking we had Boston here."  But most observers regarded the strike's violence as "accidental" ã a bloody but characteristic symptom of the "ungovernable people" who manned the nation's merchant marine.³⁸

            Although constraints on Britain's imperial capacity were especially conspicuous on the high seas, the government's authority was often no more extensive over the colonists and subject peoples on their distant shores.  To the regular officers who participated in the conquest of Canada (1759), the New England troops serving alongside them seemed utterly unreliable ã "democratic" enthusiasts to a man, who fought the French and Indians (often savagely) when it suited their purposes but who disobeyed any order that contravened their provincial terms of enlistment.³⁹   If anything, this blend of violence and autonomy was even more pronounced with respect to the empire's non-European subjects.  In 1775, the governor of St. Vincent claimed he had no control whatsoever over the island's "black Caribs," and blamed the shortcomings of the  recent treaty with them on their "bold and turbulent" behavior, and on their "Mixture with the dregs of the french . . . among whom are many runaway Negroes."⁴⁰  Even the native peoples of North America, whom the British public had a tendency to sentimentalize, were credited with the most hideous atrocities, including arson, torture, infanticide, and cannibalism.  The Indian captivity narrative became so familiar in Britain that Tobias Smollett parodied the entire genre with the character of Lieutenant Obadiah Lismahago, a penniless Scot recently returned from the colonies, who regaled the cast of Humphrey Clinker (1771) with stories of being captured and tortured by the "Badger tribe" near Fort Ticonderoga, after which he was elected their sachem and married to a princess about whose neck hung "the fresh scalp of a Mohawk warrior."⁴¹  Despite the involvement of the Royal Navy and, increasingly, the British Army, Britain's eighteenth-century expansion depended heavily on collaboration with such groups, many of whom ã European creole no less than Indian and African ã subscribed to "irregular" norms of war and diplomacy and over whom metropolitan officials exercised limited control.

            If the violence that the British and their European rivals visited on each other could be appalling, a third distinction between Europe and the extra-European world was the brutality with which Europeans treated the region's indigenous inhabitants.  In the aftermath of Somerset's Case (1772), observers frequently reiterated Blackstone's (misleading) dictum that a slave became free "the instant he lands in England."⁴²  By contrast, native peoples in the outer Atlantic were thought to inhabit political societies that ã in Vattel's words ã "observe no law," or, more precisely, no law in the highly systematic, codified form that it existed in Europe.⁴³  As the African slave trade demonstrated, the inhabitants of such societies accordingly enjoyed diminished or nonexistent rights under English common law and the law of nations.  Indeed, despite the law's muted hostility to slavery in England, only an enlightened minority disputed that merchants on the coasts of Africa were engaged in a legitimate commerce involving prisoners who enjoyed none of the safeguards afforded prisoners in Europe.  Although Anna Maria Falconbridge claimed to "wish freedom to every creature formed by God," she described Africa as a place where three-quarters of the population "come into the world, like hogs or sheep, subject, at any moment, to be rob'd of their lives by the other fourth."  While such conditions persisted, wrote Falconbridge, "I cannot think the Slave Trade inconsistent with any moral, or religious law," and she concluded that it actually promoted the continent's "happiness . . . by saving millions from perdition."⁴⁴

            Although perceptions of Native Americans differed in that the British regarded them as subsidiary allies rather than slaves, commentators did not hesitate to claim equally broad rights in places like the Ohio Valley.  Indeed, according to most experts, the "primitive" character of Indian society ã evident most notably in the absence of a recognizable system of private property ã gave both British and colonial agents the authority to dispose of "vacant" native lands, by conquest and unilateral appropriation if gentler means did not suffice.⁴⁵  Not everyone accepted this way of thinking, of course.  As Samuel Johnson observed at the start of the Seven Years' War, the struggle between Britain and France for control of North America resembled nothing so much as "the quarrel of two robbers for the spoils of a passenger."⁴⁶  For those who shared Johnson's qualms, however, an impressive battery of thinkers, including Locke, Pufendorf, and Vattel, confirmed that it was entirely legal for European settlers to seize "land of which the savages stood in no particular need, and of which they made no actual and constant use."⁴⁷

            Taken together, such assumptions made the extra-European Atlantic ã including, significantly, much of North America ã seem like a zone of endless possibility, what the literary critic Stephen Greenblatt has described as a place of "wonders" that those with the necessary resources were free to exploit to the full.⁴⁸  At times, descriptions of this wondrous state could take on a spiritual, almost rhapsodic quality.  As the English hymnist John Newton wrote of his years as a slave ship captain, life at sea "necessarily" lacked the benefits of "public ordinances and christian communion," but it also gave the "religious sailor" a rare opportunity "to observe the wonders of God in the great deep, with the two noblest objects of sight, the expanded ocean, and the expanded heaven."⁴⁹  Indeed, the outer Atlantic was capable of yielding profound insights, unimpeded by the trappings of excessive civility and refinement.  As the nascent radical John Cartwright noted of a Labrador woman who accompanied his naval vessel to England in 1769, immense structures like the hospital at Portsmouth and St. Paul's cathedral made a "wonderful impression," but her greatest surprise ã which Cartwright, in turn, found deeply revealing ã came when she learned that an Englishman could be hanged for attempting to "go into the woods and kill venison."⁵⁰ 

            Just as often, though, the miraculous served more sinister purposes, as in the preamble to a Bermuda statute of 1730, which attributed the lenient treatment of whites who murdered "Negroes Indians Mulattoes and other Slaves" to the way "things are wonderfully altered" in Britain's American colonies.⁵¹  Yet another example of this kind of imperial license was the rapidity with which Britons everywhere came to speak of 1759 as an annus mirabilis, a year of wonders when the king's forces conquered distant lands on a scale that seemed to belie Britain's commitment to the liberties of Europe in Europe.  In each instance, the tenuousness of the law beyond Europe created an environment both uncertain and remote.  Indeed, despite the colonists' allegiance to metropolitan forms and customs, there was a danger that even natural born Britons who spent too much time overseas might ã in the words of John Newton ã adopt "the tempers, customs, and ceremonies of the natives, so far as to prefer [their new] country to England."⁵²  When he wrote these words, Newton was thinking of Africa; however, his words were no less applicable to the rest of the British Atlantic. 

            By the eighteenth century's final quarter, Britons and Americans thus had two different models with which to explain the Atlantic world's legal geography, one that emphasized the modern, law-based character of colonial society, another the legal conflict and violence of the zone in which the colonies were situated.  In many ways, of course, the two models were compatible, even complementary.  Although colonists lived on intimate terms with Indians and Africans, the absence of formal systems of law among such groups left settlers theoretically free to establish political systems based entirely on the common law of England.  The result, according to many observers, was a far-flung polity that shared a remarkably uniform heritage.  "The British dominions consist of Great Britain and Ireland, divers colonies and settlements," wrote the English agronomist Arthur Young in 1772.  "The clearest method is to consider all as forming one nation, united under one sovereign, speaking the same language and enjoying the same liberty, but living in different parts of the world."⁵³  The earl of Chatham invoked the same unified image in his final, desperate plea for Anglo-American reconciliation in 1777; there was simply no reason, he insisted, why Britain's colonists "should not enjoy every fundamental right in their property, and every original substantial liberty, which Devonshire or Surrey, or the county I live in, or any other county in England, can claim."⁵⁴  The British Empire obviously contained millions of people who did not fit this Anglicized model; however, the law's blindness to Vattel's people without law made it all too easy for Britons everywhere to accept a vision of the empire as an extended consortium of English fragments.

            Ironically, the clearest indication of the British Empire's identity as a global, law-based consortium was the language that Americans used to justify their decision to secede.  Although the Declaration of Independence severed ties with Britain, it proclaimed as its larger purpose the Thirteen States' intention to "assume among the Powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and Nature's God entitle them."  Shorn of rhetorical flourishes, this meant, at the very least, assuming the same rights as the other independent states of Europe; it also signified a determination to take an active role in European treaty relations ã as trading partners if not as permanent allies.  As Richard Henry Lee observed in laying his momentous resolution of June 7, 1776, before Congress, "necessity . . . calls for Independence, as the only means by which foreign Alliances can be obtained."⁵⁵  Even Lee's fellow Virginian Thomas Jefferson, often depicted as the founding father of American isolationism, acknowledged the need for commercial treaties with Europe's maritime powers, especially those (like Britain) "having American territory."⁵⁶  As Secretary of State Edmund Randolph reminded the British ambassador in 1794, "the United States were without the European circle," but that did not mean they were excluded from the "modern" law of nations.  To suggest otherwise would be to deny them the fundamental rights of nations "because they are sovereignties of a recent date, and in the western hemisphere."⁵⁷

            Many Britons, of course, were less sanguine about the Republic's place in Europe, let alone its modern, law-abiding character.  Throughout the Revolutionary War, conservatives predicted that the wayward colonies would become havens of lawlessness and piracy, international outcasts given to warring among themselves, and tempting objects for the intriguing courts of Europe.⁵⁸  Even after adoption of the Federal Constitution of 1787, many assumed with Lord Sheffield that the "unsettled condition of the American States" made them unreliable treaty partners.⁵⁹  Metropolitan writers also gave full play to widespread perceptions of the United States as a land of slavery and coerced labor.  In the words of a pamphlet from 1796, ostensibly written to dissuade young Englishmen from emigrating to Virginia and Kentucky, even poor whites in America felt slavery's detrimental effects, laboring under indentures whose terms exposed them to "every species of brutal insolence and overbearing tyranny."⁶⁰  Viewed from this standpoint, the American Revolution simply perpetuated the violent norms that the British had long attributed to the western and southern Atlantic.

            Naturally, Americans resisted being stigmatized as a "marauding" power outside the pale of Europe, but many found reasons of their own to perpetuate the geographical division between Europe and the western reaches of the Atlantic world.  In the well-known formulation of Washington's Farewell Address (1796), the great desideratum of American politics was to extend the United States's commercial relations with foreign nations while having "as little political connection [with them] as possible."  "Europe," Washington explained, "has a set of primary interests which to us have none or a very remote relation.  Hence she must be engaged in frequent controversies, the causes of which are essentially foreign to our concerns."  As the outrage over Jay's Treaty (1794) showed, Washington's diplomatic preferences were hardly those of all Americans, but in this he spoke for most citizens of the new Republic.  "It is the true interest of America to steer clear of European contentions," wrote Thomas Paine in Common Sense (1776).  "The commerce by which [America] hath enriched herself, are the necessaries of life, and will always have a market while eating is the custom of Europe."⁶¹  In a sense, the projectors of American independence embraced key features of the old lines of amity, only in place of barbarism and violence, they envisioned a zone of natural law and justice unencumbered by the corrupt diplomatic customs of Europe.⁶²

            Each of these constructions spoke more to cultural perception than to political reality.  Nonetheless, the American Revolution had two far-reaching, deeply tangible consequences.  The first was to begin the Atlantic world's transformation into a "modern" state system comparable to that of Europe, and to produce a corresponding diminution in the space that lay beyond either international or municipal law.  Among the clearest indications of this vanishing "middle ground" was the near-simultaneous decision by Britain and the United States in 1807-1808 to outlaw the Atlantic slave trade.  Because the Atlantic world's changing legal geography was preeminently a transformation in relations between states, abolishing the commerce in human beings did not directly threaten the "domestic" policy of holding slaves.  Still, the joint action was momentous, and created a standard that British jurists, in particular, regarded as sufficiently binding to merit enforcement under the law of nations.  Within a decade, the British Admiralty Court at Sierra Leone was invoking the terms of the Federal statute to condemn American slave ships apprehended off the coast of West Africa.⁶³  Despite resentment of such judicial unilateralism in the United States, even Southern slaveholders were not insensitive to its underlying logic.  Following the insurrection on board the slave ship Creole in 1841, and the American vessel's subsequent diversion to British Nassau, a Louisiana court held that the colony's authorities were entitled to liberate any slave that entered British waters.  Although the decision was overturned in 1853, the successful attorney in the initial case, Judah Benjamin, was a prominent member of the New Orleans bar and later served as the Confederacy's secretary of state.⁶⁴

            Not all consequences of the law's expanding reach were so apparently liberationist.  As Richard White has shown in his study of European-Indian relations in the Great Lakes Region, the growing rapprochement between Britain and the United States played a key role in the disappearance of the interior "middle ground" within which settlers and Indians had interacted on terms of cultural ã and legal ã equality.⁶⁵  Although the phenomenon has yet to receive comparable attention elsewhere, the same fate befell the Seminoles of Florida, the black Caribs of St. Vincent, and Jamaica's Leeward Maroons.⁶⁶  In each instance, the growing preeminence of relations between internationally recognized states rendered the autonomy of political entities without such status all but impossible to maintain.  Significantly, only on the French island of Saint Domingue did a large non-European population avoid descent into clientage and dependency, but the Haitian Republic was also unique ã if only partially successful ã in making a bid for full membership in the Atlantic world's burgeoning state system.⁶⁷

            If the outer Atlantic was becoming modern in ways that both Weber and Franklin would have recognized, however, neither the United Sates nor its sister republics and empires entirely shed their character as political societies beyond the line.  To be sure, the international transformation wrought by the great democratic revolutions tended to obscure the new order's origins in acts of piracy and irregular warfare.  But while men and women throughout the basin did call a "New World into being" ã to paraphrase British Foreign Secretary George Canning's response to Latin America's wars of independence ã that world was less a repudiation than a restatement and, in some cases, an intensification of key features of the old order.⁶⁸  The United States in 1825 was more clearly subject to the international rule of law than British America had been fifty years earlier, and it was unambiguously independent, possessing all the rights of a European nation; however, it was still in a zone clearly distinct from Europe, with few obstacles to the domestic exploitation of slaves, the removal of Indians within its jurisdiction, and expansion into "unoccupied" territory beyond its borders.  In effect, the modernization of the Atlantic world's legal geography occurred without displacing the long-standing notion that Europeans beyond the line could do things that Europeans in Europe could not.