Question

During the late nineteenth century, the ascendancy of legal positivism fundamentally transformed the framework of international law, displacing the older natural law tradition that had previously governed diplomatic relations. Under the natural law paradigm, articulated by jurists such as Emer de Vattel, the capacity to enter into binding treaties was predicated on the inherent sovereignty of organized political communities, regardless of their institutional resemblance to European nation-states. Consequently, early colonial administrations routinely negotiated treaties with indigenous polities, implicitly recognizing their international legal personality.

However, the positivist turn, championed by scholars like John Westlake, redefined sovereignty as a status conferred exclusively by membership in the "Family of Nations"—a designation tightly constrained by criteria requiring centralized administrative bureaucracies and codified legal systems. Positivists argued that because international law was generated by the explicit consent of sovereign states, entities lacking these European institutional hallmarks existed outside the ambit of international law. Thus, earlier treaties with indigenous groups were retroactively recharacterized by positivist jurists not as international agreements, but as mere domestic contracts or unilateral assertions of colonial policy.

Despite its dominance, the positivist framework was not uniformly applied in practice. While academic jurists insisted on a strict binary between sovereign and non-sovereign entities, colonial administrators frequently encountered situations where maintaining the fiction of indigenous non-sovereignty proved administratively untenable. In regions where indigenous polities maintained substantial military capabilities or controlled vital trade routes, colonial officials continued to employ the mechanisms and rhetoric of international diplomacy. The resulting dissonance between positivist legal theory, which categorically denied the legal personality of these groups, and colonial praxis, which practically relied upon it, generated a persistent jurisdictional ambiguity that contemporary legal historians are only now beginning to fully disentangle.

Based on the passage, which one of the following can be most reasonably inferred regarding colonial administrators in the late nineteenth century?