Westlake's "Undeveloped Area" Occupation Principle

Westlake’s doctrine on uncivilized regions, as described by Edward Said, holds that territories designated “uncivilized” ought to be annexed or occupied by powers deemed advanced. Its importance lies in how it converts an Orientalist hierarchy into a practical rule of imperial action: a judgment about a people’s supposed condition becomes an argument for taking control of their territory.

The doctrine and its context

In Chapters on the Principles of International Law (1894), John Westlake argued that regions of the earth designated as “uncivilized” ought to be annexed or occupied by advanced powers. Said emphasizes that the designation was not neutral. The word carried the assumptions of Orientalism, sorting societies into advanced and backward categories and assigning the latter a subordinate status.

The doctrine belonged to a broader late-nineteenth-century framework that joined claims of cultural inferiority to biological determinism and moral-political admonishment. Racial classifications associated with Georges Cuvier, Arthur de Gobineau, and Robert Knox found support in latent Orientalism; second-order Darwinism then appeared to give the division between advanced and backward races a scientific authority. In that setting, Westlake’s argument gave legal expression to a hierarchy already circulating across scholarship and imperial debate.

From classification to occupation

Said’s account stresses the practical consequence of calling a region uncivilized: the label helped make annexation or occupation seem justified. The doctrine therefore did more than describe a difference between societies. It linked the asserted backwardness of a population to the presumed entitlement of an advanced power to rule its territory.

That logic formed part of a wider pattern in which Orientals were treated not as citizens or even as people, but as problems to be solved, confined, or taken over. Said notes that the designation “Oriental” already contained an evaluative judgment; applied to peoples living in the declining Ottoman Empire, it also implied a program of action. In this context, Westlake’s rule is a clear example of how a hierarchical description could authorize political subjection.

Place in Orientalist discourse

The doctrine’s force rested on more than an individual legal argument. Said describes Orientalism as a durable system of theory and practice, connected to political and social institutions and sustained through scholarship, books, academies, and other channels of teaching. Within that system, differences between Western and Eastern societies could be represented as fixed, while the interests behind the representation receded from view.

Westlake’s proposition accordingly makes visible the connection between knowledge and power: a territory is first classified through a vocabulary of civilizational rank, then presented as a legitimate object of control. Its significance in Said’s analysis is not simply that it expresses prejudice, but that it shows how an ostensibly principled distinction between “civilized” and “uncivilized” could serve imperial rule.