Outsmarting Great Powers: Neutrals In Maritime Multipolarity | Drs. S. Cattelan &. F. Dhondt

## Origins of Maritime Neutrality & International Law What emerges from the conversation is a revisionist, maritime-first account of neutrality: far from being a passive posture of noninvolvement, neutrality in the early modern period was born at sea as a proactive strategy deployed by smaller powers to survive, profit, and shape wider geopolitical contests. The discussion reframes neutrality not as a moral absence but as a legal and practical posture forged in oceanic commerce and prize courts — a set of rules and disputes that evolved from practice rather than strict top-down codification. This genealogy matters because it helps explain why neutrality has always been pliable: its contours were hammered out where law met navigation, trade, and the cannon’s range. The exchange underscores that maritime neutrality differs in kind from territorial neutrality. Land neutrality aims to shield a specific population and territory from the ravages of war; maritime neutrality, by contrast, was primarily about commerce and movement. In an era of expanding seaborne networks, the sea offered strategic leverage. Small and medium powers that lacked the capacity to dominate at sea could nonetheless use neutral shipping, convoy systems, and legal argumentation to preserve trade routes and supply lines. The law of the sea, in this view, is less a set of pristine doctrines and more a contested seam where merchants, admiralty courts, and diplomats negotiated power. Throughout the conversation, a recurring theme is the bottom-up development of international law. Rules governing capture, contraband, and convoy emerged through litigated prize cases, diplomatic bargaining, and bilateral treaties; they were continually revised as maritime practice changed. The participants present neutrality as a discursive and doctrinal toolbox that states and non-state actors alike used to press their interests. Rather than accepting an ahistorical model of law imposed by great powers, the discussion locates agency in the messy, iterative interactions of sailors, insurers, courts, and foreign ministries. Finally, the historical survey offered in the conversation refuses to reify “neutrality” into a single, stable concept. Instead, it emphasizes plurality: multiple conceptions, overlapping usages, and competing doctrines coexisted. That plurality helped smaller powers exploit legal ambiguity — turning legal doctrines into tactical instruments in asymmetric contests with dominant maritime states. ## Trade, Profit, and Political Necessity The conversation pushes back on a common misconception: that neutral states who traded widely with belligerents were merely profiteers or moral shirkers. Instead, trade was often a political and systemic necessity for regional equilibrium. Neutral commerce could serve as an economic lifeline for belligerents, a buffer that prevented acute shortages, and even a deliberate lever employed by great powers to balance rivals across theaters. Far from being an indictment, commercial activity by neutrals was frequently an essential component of the international order. Case studies discussed reveal how neutral trade functioned as both self-preservation and geopolitical utility. Minor polities with commercial fleets could project influence disproportionately — one example likened certain small states to modern multinational corporations, with trading networks that spanned the Caribbean, the Baltic, and West Africa. In many instances, neutrals facilitated commerce that kept continental conflicts from escalating into total collapse, or they provided intermediaries useful to great powers pursuing strategic ends in distant theaters. This demonstrates that neutrality frequently operated as a service to the international system, not simply as a private profit-seeking venture. Yet trade-by-neutral was rarely a one-sided good. Dominant sea powers viewed neutral commerce through a security lens: neutral trade could indirectly bolster enemy states and undercut blockades. This contradiction fueled legal and military pressure to limit neutral advantages. The conversation illustrates how belligerents pushed to broaden concepts such as contraband and blockade precisely to choke off these indirect supply channels. Neutral states, in turn, navigated between asserting legal rights and avoiding escalation, sometimes leveraging political bargaining, convoy systems, and tactical alignments to defend their trade. The interplay between profit and politics underscores a fundamental point the discussion highlights: neutrality was frequently situational and instrumental. Economic incentives drove neutrality, but the economic behavior of neutrals often had political consequences. The law of neutrality thus became the arena where commercial motives, strategic imperatives, and legal claims collided. ## Contraband, Dual-Use Goods, and Neutral Rights A critical thread in the dialogue is the evolving contest over what counts as contraband — the classic flashpoint between belligerent prerogatives and neutral freedoms. In early modern practice, contraband was rarely a simple binary. Many goods, from horses to timber, had both civilian and military uses, producing a dense web of interpretation and litigation. The conversation draws a direct line to the contemporary debates over “dual-use” goods: the same dynamics of expansionist categorization by belligerents and defensive narrowing by neutrals persist. Historically, the conflict over contraband played out in prize courts and at sea. Powerful maritime states sought to expand contraband categories to include staple commodities during wartime (grain being the prime example), reasoning that depriving the enemy of subsistence was a legitimate war aim. Neutrals resisted, invoking treaties, customary practice, and legal doctrine to maintain the right to trade harmless goods. The result was chronic legal contestation: bilateral treaties with vague clauses, divergent admiralty rulings, and ad hoc diplomatic arrangements. The conversation surfaces how belligerent attempts to recast common staples as contraband had social and political consequences ashore. Blockades and prize seizures could exacerbate famines, provoke domestic unrest, and, paradoxically, prompt neutral states to act in ways that reconfigured alliances. One striking pattern noted is the use of convoy systems by neutrals to safeguard shipments that belligerents sought to intercept — a practical response that had legal implications and raised the stakes in maritime confrontations. Contemporary parallels are obvious and instructive. The modern proliferation of dual-use technology and the geopoliticization of supply chains echo the old debates. The historical record, as drawn out in the exchange, suggests that legal clarity is rarely immediate; instead, categories of contraband and controlled goods are renegotiated under pressure. The lesson is not that law is powerless, but that law is responsive — and that small actors can exploit ambiguity to preserve essential trade. ## Unlikely Actors & Situational Neutrality One of the more compelling insights from the conversation is the centrality of “unlikely actors” — duchies, trading companies, local authorities, and even private merchants — in shaping neutrality rules. Neutrality was not the exclusive province of great powers or central governments; it was a practical condition produced by a broad cast of actors, each with particular interests and capabilities. This decentralized ecology is essential to understanding how neutrality functioned in practice. Small polities often punched above their weight by leveraging particular assets: strategic geography, merchant fleets, or legal sophistication. Examples discussed include smaller northern powers that could temporarily close off sea approaches or similarly minor actors who acted as brokers in distant theaters. These actors did not simply accept legal prescriptions; they actively used

Outsmarting Great Powers: Neutrals In Maritime Multipolarity | Cattelan & Dhondt Everyone thinks neutrality means staying out of trouble. But what if it's actually about diving straight into the chaos to stay involved? We need to ask: is international law just a tool for the powerful, or can the little guys use it to strike back? To find out, I brought in Dr. Stefano Catellan and Professor Frederick Dhondt from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. They’ve spent years digging into this history for their new book, Small Power Neutrality and the Law of the Sea, uncovering how small nations used the open ocean to outsmart the world's biggest empires. Links: [Book] Small Power Neutrality and the Law of the Sea: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Small-Neutrality-Eighteenth-Century-1650-1800/dp /9004724427 Neutrality Studies substack: https://pascallottaz.substack.com (Opt in for Academic Section from your profile settings: https://pascallottaz.substack.com/s/academic) Merch & Donations: https://neutralitystudies-shop.fourthwall.com Timestamps: 00:00:00 Introduction & Book Motivation 00:02:59 Origins of Maritime Neutrality & International Law 00:10:57 Trade, Profit, and Political Necessity 00:16:09 Contraband, Dual-Use Goods, and Neutral Rights 00:27:33 Unlikely Actors & Situational Neutrality 00:41:43 Modern Lessons for Small Powers #Pascal Welcome back, everybody. Today we’re talking about my favorite topic—neutrality. I’ve got with me Dr. Stefano Cattelan and Professor Frederik Dhondt from the Faculty of Law and Criminology at the Vrije University of Brussels. The two recently published an edited book called *Small Power Neutrality and the Law of the Sea in the Long 18th Century, 1650–1800*. That’s what we want to discuss today. So, Stefano, Frederik, welcome. #Cattelan Hi, Pascal. Hi, everyone, and thank you very much for the kind introduction. Shall I start, Frederik, or would you like to? #Pascal Maybe, Stefano, why don’t you start? Tell us a little bit about the motivation for this book, and maybe how it came together. #Cattelan Of course. So basically, the story of this book is that Frederik and I have been working together for the last four years in Brussels at the Université de Bruxelles on a project about the interplay between -- 1 of 13 -- neutrality and the law of the sea in the long 18th century. I first came to Brussels in 2022 with a Casberg Foundation Internationalization Fellowship, and then the project continued—or is continuing—for three more years, thanks to funding from the FWO, the Research Foundation of Flanders. The whole idea of the project, and also of the book, is to merge my own research interests—my background as a legal historian working on the law of the sea and its development in the early modern period—with Frederik’s expertise, which focuses on, though not exclusively, diplomatic history and legal-diplomatic argumentation in the 18th century and beyond. So basically, the whole idea was for us to merge what we do from, let's say, slightly different backgrounds, but still within the larger field of legal history, and to meet and combine our expertise. This book, in particular, is also the result of an international symposium we organized in Paris in 2023 at the Fondation Birman-Laporte, where we gathered historians and legal historians to think about small-power neutrality, with a focus on maritime neutrality—both from a legal-historical, but also an economic-historical and, you know, broadly historical perspective. And this endeavor is continuing to this day, as we’re now planning a new conference at the end of this year. #Pascal You know, this is wonderful. Right now, we’re witnessing a very difficult time for international law— just to connect a little bit with what’s happening at the moment, with the United States attacking Venezuela. And, you know, we see a lot of things crumbling. But this shouldn’t make us forget that, at the end of the day, international law isn’t about imposing something from the top; it’s about how rules actually develop from the bottom up. So, Frederik, could you maybe talk a bit about this? Because I think one of your contributors, Stephen Neff, makes that point. And maybe you can also explain why neutrality is a maritime concept. Most people think of it as something that applies on land, but it actually originates at sea—at least in the way we understand it in international law today. Could you talk a little about that? #Dhondt Thank you. Well, that’s a lot of things together in one question, I would say. As it happens, I’ve just been going through your book *Notions of Neutralities*, and Stephen Neff’s excellent chapter on American conceptions of neutrality in the 1930s is a good illustration of the dilemmas you highlighted in the first question. International law is not fully codified; it evolves with the behavior of the actors who need to accept the norms they abide by. And I think that this is the reason why we’ ve been able to work on a topic like neutrality for this period. If we go back to Stephen Neff's fundamental work on the rights and duties of neutrals, published in the early 2000s, we see a gradual evolution, right? In the 19th and late 19th centuries, the rules became more detailed or more fixed, but the law of neutrality was never really cast in stone. It’s always subject to legal interpretation—by judges, by thinkers—and it’s used in practice by diplomats, of course. The broader power dynamics also influence it. And if you look at the world we see today, -- 2 of 13 -- the question remains: is it might, or is it right? It’s an eternal dilemma in the history of international law. When I started working on this period—the first half of the 18th century—my focus was on France, on French diplomacy, and neutrality really didn’t come into the picture. I was studying how the French and the British tried to amend the international order after the Peace of Utrecht in 1713. It was only when studying the case of Belgium in the 19th century, in a postdoc project on permanent neutrality, that I started getting interested in the concept of neutrality as a lawyer or as a legal historian. Why? Because maintaining one’s neutrality is a result of physical capabilities—you must be able to deter potential aggressors. But the right to declare oneself neutral is a contested issue in the early modern period—the period that precedes the 19th century. And the link between neutrality and sovereignty is quite attractive, quite alluring. I think we’ve been able to nuance the general image of this a bit in our introduction and in the volume as a whole. If you look at the index of concepts, we have 21 different associations with the word “neutrality,” and we deliberately chose not to make a choice there. The right to be neutral is the right to choose between being a belligerent and not being one. And that is also linked to either a more horizontal or a more hierarchical vision of the agency of actors in the international arena. Depending on your point of view, you come to a different definition of neutrality and of the rights and obligations it entails. So Stephen F. famously classified three schools of neutrality in the early modern period, and he elaborates further on that in the concluding article of our volume. Those schools are an attempt by doctrine to classify something that is horribly complex in practice, and the merit of our volume, I think, is—as Stefano has indicated—to bring together various expertises to construct the interpretation of norms from the bottom up. I think a common point with the book *Notions of Neutrality* is that we’re trying to uncover how players in a strategic big game formulate their positions using the word “neutrality,” and use it as a vehicle to further their own interests. The more you go into detail—as we see in the contributions by Victor Wilson, John Freeman, or Christian Fister—the more different actors we meet: private individuals, corporations, local authorities. Neutrality then becomes a lens through which to look at a very complex reality. And that, I think, goes even beyond the legal paradigm and makes the book so interesting and fascinating. #Pascal Hey, very brief intermission because I was recently banned from YouTube. And although I'm back, this could happen again at any time. So please consider subscribing not only here but also to my mailing list on Substack—that’s pascallottaz.substack.com. The link will be in the description below. And now, back to the video. Thank you. Stefan, what do you want to add to this one? #Cattelan -- 3 of 13 -- Yeah, maybe I can add something on the maritime dimension of the historical genesis of neutrality, and also why the book is basically focused on maritime neutrality. It’s just, yeah, because as you rightly pointed out, the genesis of neutrality as we know it—of early modern neutrality—was very much linked to the sea. And, let’s say, the best reflections of the 18th century on neutrality were actually devoted to what was happening at sea, in a century that saw the expansion of seaborne trade—both, let’s say, short-term trade across Europe, cabotage techniques, but also, let’s say, long- range intercontinental commerce. And indeed, as someone like Erik Zurcher, who wrote a masterful book on early modern neutrality, *Anthropologie RLAP*, also pointed out, maritime neutrality is very different from land neutrality. Land neutrality basically tries to preserve a territory and a population from war and from harm done by the belligerents, while maritime neutrality is much more about commerce—an attempt by neutrals to profit from the state of war and from the fact that, in theory, they’re able to trade more smoothly compared to the belligerents. So again, it’s really a different type of neutrality, and one that was at the heart of the initial reflection on what the neutral status actually is. #Pascal This is one of the things I find so fascinating—you know, that a lot of people misunderstand neutrality and then point and say, “Oh, but these neutrals, they trade with everybody. They’re not neutral; they’re trying to profit.” Oh yeah, really? No, that’s just what they do, that’s just what they assert. Maybe, Frederick, Stefano, whoever wants to jump in—can you talk a little bit about the connection between trade and remaining neutral? #Dhondt If I may jump in on that, it's an old debate, of course. The dominant power at sea generally does not like neutral trade, because neutral trade allows its opponents to make up for their lack of physical strength or to meet resource needs through neutral trading vessels. And that’s only part of the ambiguity of end-on trade—that’s the classical reproach. However, it’s very difficult to disentangle the political and commercial aspects of neutrality. If we look at the chapter by John Freeman on the Duchy of Courland, it’s quite clear that the Duke of Courland, a minor secondary player in the Baltic and in northeastern Europe, is asked to be present, for instance, in the West Indies, in the Caribbean, because some kind of similar go-between player is necessary for maintaining the overall balance of the system in another sphere of the world. If you were to project, and the picture could come up here—our index of places on Google Maps— you’d see that the contributions in our volume, although based on European archival sources, actually cover the globe. It’s a way to project power to other parts of the world and to balance relations between European powers present elsewhere. And benefiting from trade is sometimes the main reason neutrals are viewed with a certain unease by bigger players, but sometimes it’s not that at all—there are other reasons as well. -- 4 of 13 -- And the chapter by Victor Wilson, for instance, on the Caribbean in the late 18th century and during the Napoleonic Wars, is also a good illustration of that. Those two aspects are closely intertwined, and I think the volume would have been a lot less interesting