Into the Outward State

In late February 2019, I received a most welcome email from Prof. Holly Case of Brown University, who was exploring the possibility of putting together a day-long conference/workshop on consuls to be held … in May 2019. Those of you in US academia will know that this is an exceptionally short timeline for putting an event like this together. I was enthusiastic about participating, and so were many other people. It turned out to be a fantastic conference bringing together people working on a range of countries’ consular services, often with a particular interest in consular officials operating in the Ottoman Empire.

Here is the conference program:Download

My presentation, titled “Complicated, but Crucial … and Exceptional? Sovereignty and State Building in the US Consular Service,” was basically a brief summary of my chapter in Crossing Empires, showing the growth of the service over time and the post-Civil War expansion into the British Empire before offering my theory of three co-existing consular services, stressing the importance of consular activities to the functioning of the US government more broadly, and providing some comparative international data.

This is a basic visualization of my interpretation of the US Consular Service, with three systems in concurrent operation. At major ports, trade and travel was the emphasis, and any government could participate as equals if they played by the Europeans’ rules. In the extraterritorial system, Europeans and Americans operated their own legal systems on their hosts’ territory without extending reciprocal privileges; the Ottoman Empire and China are the main places in which this system operated. In the “informal empire” system, consular officials from a single country were the only consular officials present, and their efforts to promote their government’s interests could result in a weakening of European colonial ties or independent sovereignty in favor of closer ties with the consular official’s government.