Analysis of the formal elements in treaties of peace from their earliest surviving appearance in the fourteenth century b. c. to our era presents formidable obstacles, not the least being the myriad forms and the thousands of such documents in widely scattered sources, even though the inquiry is limited to the Western world and its extensions. Yet that is precisely the task that Jorg Fisch has undertaken. His analysis is presented in a carefully articulated survey, divided by topic, and, within topic, by time and territory. Each of the first four chapters, two of the three appendixes, and all of the tables follow a uniform ordering of treatment, carefully justified in the introduction. The chapters deal with declarations of guilt and amnesty, statements on the new peace relative to the previous one, i. e., restoration and change, with duration, and the phrasing of the texts with special attention to reasoning and justification. Chapter V examines the conclusion of peace and the results of the treaties as they may be inferred from the texts. The three appendixes cover the history of negotiations in terms of international law, the documentary sources, and the texts of nine selected treaties in the original language and German translation. The tables analyze quantitatively the characteristics in the exact order followed in the discussion. Fisch has supplemented printed sources by recourse to archives, where necessary, particularly for some of the pacts of Spain with American Indians.
The scheme gives ample space for the examination of treaties, broadly defined, between European colonial powers and non-European peoples. Fisch finds that ascriptions of guilt for hostilities are especially prominent in such documents, and thinks that the revival of that motif in the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 is to be ascribed to transfer from the colonial world rather than to European custom in which such ascriptions had been prominent before 1816. The colonial powers differed in their treaties with American Indians in that Spain, because of its claims to sovereignty over America, attempted to avoid formal pacts until, in dealing with the Araucanians and the Indians of the southeastern United States, it could no longer do so, even though it continued to try to insert in the text assertions of sovereignty. The colonial powers were alike in that their pacts with Indians warned of the evil intentions of other powers and declared themselves the great father of the natives. In colonial pacts, power relationships were almost always unequal and that inequality is reflected in the texts. Fisch decides that the practice of the United States in its Indian treaties is a development from British usage. A compact version of his findings on Spain and its dealings with American Indians may be found in the Jahrbuch für Geschichte von Staat, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft Lateinamerikas, 16 (1979), 205-243. The article and, even more, the book are remarkable inquiries that make a contribution that will not soon be equaled, even less superseded.
