21 Oct 2025 – Prof. Saliha Belmessous, British Academy Global Professor, University of Oxford – Empire and Obligation: Rethinking Colonial Relationships as Social Contracts (Insights from the British and French Empires, 19th–20th Century).
About Professor Saliha Belmessous
British Academy Global Professor; Fellow of Corpus Christi
Professor Belmessous challenges traditional views of colonialism by exploring the idea of a “social contract” between colonizers and the colonized. Focusing on the British and French Empires in the 19th and 20th centuries, she will delve into the legal and moral frameworks that shaped these relationships. Her lecture will shed light on the promises and obligations—both explicit and implicit—that underpinned imperial rule and how these were understood, challenged, and ultimately broken by different groups. This offers a new perspective on the dynamics of power and resistance in colonial history.
I research and teach the global history of empires. I am interested in the political and legal history of colonisation; the imperial experiences of colonised peoples; and the dynamics of cross-cultural encounters — these are all issues that have an impact upon contemporary problems. My current research reassesses how we think about international law. In my British Academy-funded project on ‘Legal Encounters at the Origins of International Law’, I want to shift the focus away from European theorists of international law, who are still the main object of scholarly study today, to the legal negotiations conducted by non-Europeans and Europeans in the Americas, Africa and the Pacific from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. I am interested in investigating whether the legal world in which non-European and European societies interacted was far more flexible and inclusive than what past jurists, and scholars studying them, have asserted. [Oxford University – Faculty of History]
Featured Image is the Te Tiriti o Waitangi – Treaty of Waitangi