ABSTRACT
Over no other aspect of peacemaking have Western attitudes fluctuated more violently during the past two hundred years than the imposition of indemnities or reparations on defeated nations. Although they were sanctioned by Vattel and other international lawyers, the demand for indemnities was relatively rare after eighteenth-century European wars. It was the French revolutionaries and Napoleon who changed this convention by forcing their defeated enemies to pay for their own conquest. In the nineteenth century the Russians and the British forced non-European states to pay indemnities, and Bismarck ‘repatriated’ the system to Europe after his victories against Denmark, Austria and France. But Russia showed in 1905 that such payments were still regarded as bitterly humiliating and that it would rather continue its unsuccessful war against Japan than subsidise its conqueror.
