Modern international law has often approached sovereignty through binary distinctions: sovereign or non-sovereign, independent or colonized, equal or unequal. The formally independent but externally constrained polities of the late 19th and early 20th centuries complicate these categories. The examples discussed in this colloquy, Qing and interwar China alongside 19th century Morocco, reveal forms of sovereignty increasingly measured against ideals of territorial exclusivity and sovereign equality, yet continually qualified by extraterritorial privileges, foreign intervention, and unequal international obligations. Rather than chronicling a linear expansion of sovereign equality, these cases show how jurisdictional plurality and asymmetrical power relations were reconfigured within an international order formally based on equality.

Intermediary Governance

One of the clearest common features across these contexts of constrained sovereignties seems to be the growing importance of intermediaries. In China, as Li Cao shows in “Legal Order from Disorder”, the Chinese Maritime Customs Service (CMCS) emerged from the fractured legal and political environment of the treaty ports as an institution that was formally Chinese yet largely administered by foreigners. It functioned simultaneously as customs administration, diplomatic advisor, translator of international law, and mediator between Qing authorities and foreign powers. Neither fully foreign nor fully national, the CMCS occupied an in-between position that destabilized the idea that sovereignty requires exclusive and unitary state authority. It further illustrates a broader tradition of non-state entities vested with public authority in international affairs, as exemplified earlier by the Dutch East India Company.

This tension between formal sovereignty and dispersed authority appeared elsewhere in regions subject to imperial pressure. In “Negotiating the Sultan’s Sovereignty under European Imperialism in Morocco”, Antoine Perrier notes that in Morocco, European powers fragmented the sultan’s authority without formally abolishing it, by progressively expanding systems of consular protection that placed Moroccan protégés under foreign jurisdiction. Further east in the Ottoman Empire, capitulations and mixed courts similarly institutionalized overlapping jurisdictions and shared legal authority between imperial and foreign actors.¹ In all these cases, intermediary institutions mediated rather than displaced sovereignty, a possibility facilitated by longstanding traditions of legal pluralism.² What later legal doctrine would characterize as fragmentation³ was, in practice, a durable form of political ordering.

The Territorialisation of Sovereignty

Next to the proliferation of intermediary institutions, one of the most significant consequences of the legal transformations of the long nineteenth century was the growing tendency to define sovereignty through territorial administration, fiscal extraction, and centralized governance. Across a range of settings, from the Meiji land tax reforms in Japan⁴ to the tartīb in Morocco, fiscal reorganization became closely associated with the consolidation of territorial state authority.

In Morocco, authority had long rested on relational forms of allegiance grounded in Islamic law and the contractual logic of bayʿa rather than exclusive and territorially uniform control. Under rising imperial pressure, however, claims to sovereignty were increasingly measured by a state’s capacity to administer territory, collect revenue, and exercise effective jurisdiction. Fiscal reforms such as the tartīb reflected this shift, linking political authority to administrative reach even as consular protections and foreign jurisdictions limited the sultan’s authority.

A comparable dynamic unfolded in China. Despite longstanding forms of differentiated authority, sovereign claims gradually came to be based on territorial jurisdiction, administrative capacity, and centralized state power. The treaty port system and institutions such as the CMCS contributed to this reorientation by extending Qing administrative reach and fiscal capacity, even though they remained embedded in internationalized structures of authority. By the interwar period, as Lucas Brang’s analysis in “Inequality and its Afterlives” demonstrates, efforts to revise the unequal treaties and recover tariff autonomy reflected this emerging conception of sovereignty. Yet the realization of these sovereign claims remained mediated by international agreements and enduring asymmetries of power.

These cases suggest that rather than displacing layered authority, modern territorial statehood emerged through institutions that expanded state capacity while simultaneously embedding it within unequal international arrangements whose effects would outlast the formal achievement of sovereign equality.

The Stickiness of Inequality

The interwar Chinese debates surrounding the “new treaties” illustrate this dynamic with particular clarity. Histories of unequal treaties often present treaty revision as recovery of sovereign equality. However, the replacement of formally unequal treaties by “equal” agreements did not eliminate asymmetry. Instead, inequality reappeared in new legal vocabularies of reciprocity, reform, and economic openness, as the relinquishment of extraterritorial privileges was made conditional upon the opening of Chinese markets to foreign trade and residence. Formal equality thus coexisted with new forms of external economic discipline.

The Moroccan experience points to the same underlying dynamic. The Algeciras Conference of 1906 formally recognized the “sovereignty of His Majesty the Sultan” but also expanded European supervision over Moroccan finances and administration. Likewise, further east, institutions such as the Ottoman Public Debt Administration subjected key areas of fiscal governance to international oversight while leaving the formal structures of sovereignty intact.⁵ In each case, recognition and constraint advanced together rather than sequentially.

These examples challenge teleological accounts claiming that imperial inequality gave way to sovereign equality. They reveal the “stickiness” of inequality: asymmetrical relations persisted through adaptation to new legal forms. Rather than disappearing, hierarchy was recast through doctrines of reciprocity, reform, international supervision, and juridical recognition. Sovereignty was not simply restricted from without; it was reconfigured through practices that redistributed authority and rendered external oversight compatible with formal independence.

This tension outlived the imperial formations in which it first emerged. Although decolonization and the universalization of sovereign equality transformed the juridical landscape, disputes over economic dependency, natural resources, and the New International Economic Order continued to expose the gap between formal equality and substantive power. The persistence of these inequalities suggests that the problem was never the absence of sovereignty, but the unequal conditions under which sovereign authority was exercised.

Conclusion: Negotiating Sovereignty under Asymmetry

The Chinese, Moroccan, and other polities often described as “semi-colonial” cast doubt on narratives of an international order founded on the progressive realization of sovereign equality. Positioned between formal independence and colonial subordination, they confounded these ideals and categories in practice.

Their significance lies not just in challenging the binary categories through which global history has often been written, but in revealing sovereignty itself as a historically contingent and continually reconfigured form of political authority. Far from being a stable, territorial, or indivisible possession, sovereign authority was exercised through layered jurisdictions, intermediary institutions, and differentiated governmental competences. What distinguished these polities was not that sovereignty was negotiated or shared, as it often was in European political history, but the conditions under which it was negotiated: within an international order that universalized the language of sovereign equality while reproducing enduring asymmetries of power.

These polities continually reimagined sovereignty in diverse institutional forms, seeking to preserve and expand autonomous political authority to the fullest extent that imperial encroachment allowed. However, rather than overturning hierarchy, their efforts reconfigured it through new institutional arrangements and legal vocabularies that reconciled sovereign authority with persistent external constraints. They therefore illuminate a constitutive tension of modern international law: the universal promise of sovereign equality has long coexisted with unequal conditions for the exercise of sovereign authority

1. Zülâl Muslu, “Ottoman Mixed Commercial Courts,” in Max Planck Encyclopedia of International Procedural Law (Oxford University Press, 2023). ↩︎
2. For discussions of how pre-existing regimes of legal pluralism facilitated overlapping jurisdictions like consular courts, see e.g. Pär Kristoffer Cassel, Grounds of Judgment: Extraterritoriality and Imperial Power in Nineteenth-Century China and Japan (Oxford University Press, 2012). ↩︎
3. International Law Commission, Fragmentation of International Law: Difficulties Arising from the Diversification and Expansion of International Law, Report of the Study Group of the International Law Commission, finalized by Martti Koskenniemi, UN Doc. A/CN.4/L.682 (2006). ↩︎
4. See Marius B. Jansen, The Making of Modern Japan (Harvard University Press, 2000). ↩︎
5. See e.g. Murat Birdal, The Political Economy of Ottoman Public Debt: Insolvency and European Financial Control in the Late Nineteenth Century (I.B. Tauris, 2010). ↩︎