The Science of Decolonization: The Retention of ‘Environmental Authority’ in the Contest for Antarctic Sovereignty between Britain, Argentina, and Chile, 1939–59

Abstract

Early in 1955, the British government made a unilateral submission to the International Court of Justice in the Hague requesting adjudication on the sovereignty of the Antarctic Peninsula region, directly to the south of South America. Since 1908, Great Britain had claimed this vast area as part of its colonial empire, administered from Stanley in the Falkland Islands as the Falkland Islands Dependencies. Stretching all the way to the South Pole, the Dependencies were the largest territory under the authority of the Colonial Office. The primary motive for Britain’s claim to this region was the desire to tax and regulate the nascent Antarctic whaling industry, and for a while the Dependencies returned a handsome profit. The British claim to the region, however, overlapped significantly with the claims of Argentina and Chile, and since the beginning of the Second World War, the three countries had been involved in a costly sovereignty dispute, which on several occasions threatened to turn violent. Britain’s unilateral submission to the International Court of Justice represented an attempt to resolve the dispute honorably and avoid setting a bad precedent for other parts of its colonial empire.