Of Spiders and Bees 213sisted the war eff ort of a belligerent, the classic example being the carriage of
troops.
Even if Scott’s admiralty court was not a court of the En glish common
law, Scott stands out as the most quintessentially En glish of all major fi gures
in the history of international law, patiently building the law on a piecemeal
basis, in the manner of a coral reef. He never wrote a treatise. But his judg-
ments still sparkle over a gap of two centuries and more. For the most part,
however, international law was not a judge- made corpus, in the manner of
the En glish common law. We have seen that its major builders were system-
atic thinkers in the rationalist tradition, or else pragmatists like Bynker-
shoek and Martens, who paid attention to the whole range of state practice—
including treaties and national legislation— in addition to court decisions.
Scott’s work was therefore very infl uential within the English- speaking world,
but little noted outside it.
Nevertheless, the overall trend continued to be in the direction of the prag-
matists over the rationalists. Th is trend was even reinforced by the French
Revolution because of the unsettling association between po liti cal radical-
ism and appeals to natural law and natural rights. Th e fi nal defeat of France
in 1815 naturally served to discredit, at least to some extent, the subversive
ideas that had animated it. In the coming century, the dominant role of the
pragmatists would go much further yet, and the extreme state practice end
of the international- law spectrum would begin to attract an important
crowd. Th e ants would contest the fi eld with the spiders and the bees.