UC Berkeley

What are the determinants of geopolitical governance? By this I mean: why do certain states, at certain points in time, influence and lead other states and non-state actors in world politics? And why do other states fail to do so? Traditional explanations emphasize the military and economic capabilities of states. Such accounts suggest that the greater the material resources of a state—or the capacity to deploy those resources—the better positioned it is to influence and lead its rivals. This dissertation argues that such accounts, while not wrong, are in significant respects incomplete. It does so through a historical analysis of European geopolitics between 1688 and 1783. As I show, Britain exercised comparatively little governance over other European polities relative to its striking military and economic dominance in this period. By contrast, I show that France enjoyed more effective geopolitical governance, despite its military and economic weakness with respect to Britain (though not with respect to most European states).

This dissertation accounts for the discrepancy between French and British governance in eighteenth-century European geopolitics by offering an alternative theoretical model. According to this alternative model, the sources of geopolitical governance inhere not just in the material capabilities but in the symbolic capacities of states to secure recognition from their foreign counterparts. Further, I identify social conditions of possibility of symbolic capacity itself. One such condition, I argue, is a degree of “fit” or congruence between the sociopolitical structures of governing states and those polities over which they exercise their governance. This is because structurally similar states tend to produce diplomatic agents with similar dispositions—habitus—leading them to conduct diplomacy according to forms that are mutually legible. And it is because they tend to embody similar relations of sovereignty itself, leading them to conduct diplomacy according to interests that are mutually legitimate.

Concretely, then, I argue that France exercised significant governance in eighteenth-century European geopolitics because, in addition to its extensive military and economic capabilities, France’s external agents (its diplomats) embodied dispositions and represented interests that major European polities tended to recognize as legible and legitimate. Such diplomacy involved the habitus of a courtier, and it involved the interests of dynastic reproduction and patrimonial property. By contrast, Britain’s geopolitical governance was limited because its diplomats embodied dispositions and represented interests that appeared questionably legitimate and at times illegible to major continental polities. They did so because the social relations of capitalism and of relatively impersonal sovereignty that were developing in Britain constituted elites who were ill-equipped to pursue diplomacy according to the rules of courtly-patrimonial geopolitics. Ironically, however, this means that the very factors which account for eighteenth-century Britain’s remarkable military and economic dominance—its capitalist relations, its non-patrimonial bureaucracy, its parliamentary regime—actually impeded its exercise of geopolitical governance, given the historically specific system of courtly-patrimonial polities within which Britain was constrained to participate.