The foundations of Vattels 'system' of politics and the Seven Years' War: moral philosophy, luxury and the constitutional commercial state

Other than as a paradigmatic figure in international legal history, Emer de Vattel is known nowadays as an anglophile. This idea of Vattel’s political preferences and ideological commitments is not a recent invention but stems from the late eighteenth century. In that period, the influential writings of Edmund Burke and others portrayed Vattel in their own image as a supporter of the British constitution and rule of law and more generally of the benign role of a British superpower whose possession of colonial territories and interest in a tranquil global commercial sphere served to keep the world well ordered and at peace. Such ideas were at least partially carried over through elective affinities between late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writers and statesmen into the conceptual discourses that were implicated in the geopolitical design of the Congress of Vienna in 1815. The aim of this article is to complicate this narrative and reframe Vattel as also a critic of the British “mercantile system”; however, much he saw the British constitution as a potential model and platform for the perfection of commercial society and the state