CALL FOR PAPERS AND CONTRIBUTIONS: "Among Empires: Transimperial Circulation of Political Models and Scientific Knowledge. The Case of Four “Latecomers” (Germany, Italy, Belgium, and Japan), 1880s-1940s" (Università di Napoli Federico II, DEADLINE: 30 November 2024)

Over the last three decades at least, historians of different orientations have striven to overcome the nation-state as the unit of analysis to instead highlight the global dimension of phenomena, establish comparisons, or analyze the intersections and interconnections between different political entities. The attempt to apply this approach to empires has led to the development of a ‘transimperial’ research agenda, which focuses on spaces of intersections, encounters, and clashes of colonial rulers and anti-colonial actors within and across empires and brings under the same analytical framework competition, cooperation, and connectivity. In the transimperial approach, the comparison has been intended more as a historical object of investigation than as a method of historiography. Through the ‘politics of comparison,’ different historical actors observed and assessed other empires’ ideas and practices, aiming to emulate, reject, or mix them and giving place to new models of colonial policies.

We seek original contributions that, through the lens of the politics of comparison, focus on four latecomer empires, namely Germany, Italy, Belgium, and Japan – the case of the United States which also falls within this chronology is not part of our project – that started their colonial expansion at the end of the nineteenth century. In these countries and their colonies and protectorates, heated debates took place around the search for (historical or current foreign) models, and politicians, activists, and intellectuals often demanded the transimperial circulation of colonial knowledge, be it legal, political, or scientific.

In particular, we are interested in two distinct yet bordering fields:

 Models of colonial policies from a global perspective: for example, the debate on direct/indirect rule, regimes of belonging (citizenship, colonial subjecthood), education policies targeted at colonial subjects, co-optation in the colonial administration of local peoples, etc.

 Transimperial circulation of colonial knowledge in scientific fields such as medicine, agronomy, anthropology, legal culture, etc.

Selected scholars will be invited to present their research either in individual seminars or larger workshops that will take place in 2025 at the University of Naples Federico II or the University of Eastern Piedmont (Italy). The organization will fully reimburse the scholars coming from Europe; in other cases, it will assess on a case-by-case basis.

Papers will then be published as contributions in a peer-reviewed collective publication in English edited by the group working on the project “Imperial Entanglements: Latecomer Colonial Empires and the “Politics of Comparison” (1880s-1940s)” (PRIN 2022), a project jointly funded by the Italian government and the European Union (see www.imperialentanglements.it)

Applicants should submit:

1. an abstract of their paper of about 500 words

2. a short biography (no more than 300 words)

Email: imperialentanglements2022@gmail.com

Deadline: 30 November 2024

Acceptances will be sent by December 2024

Consult the project organizer's website "Imperial Entanglements" for more info.

BOOK: Anne PETERS & Tom SPARKS (eds.), "The Individual in International Law" (The History and Theory of International Law, OUP, 2024)

Source: OUP

Description:

Shifts across the corpus of international law have brought the international legal system into a closer alignment with the interests of the individual. This has led to a great and growing interest in the roles and status of individuals in international law, and provided new impulses for debate.

The Individual in International Law is an exploration of what is described as the humanisation of international law. It examines how international law has accommodated individuals, and how individual status, rights, and obligations have become denser and more important in the international legal system. Split into two parts, the book analyses the humanisation of international law in different historical periods and from various theoretical perspectives. The first part focuses on the historical evolution of international law, exploring how the interests of individuals have shaped the development of the legal system from antiquity to 1945, providing a counterpoint to State-centric readings of international law's history. The second part contains theoretical debates, critical approaches, and interdisciplinary investigations, offering perspectives from ius positivism and ius naturalism, Marxism, TWAIL, feminism, global law, global constitutionalism, law and economics, and legal anthropology. The book aims to stimulate further research on the humanisation and dehumanisation of new fields ranging from the ius contra bellum to climate law. The editors' introduction and conclusion frame the contributions, draw together their findings, and address critiques comprehensively.

Written by a team of acknowledged experts in their fields, this volume elucidates how the interests, rights, obligations, and responsibilities of individuals have shaped international norms and regimes, and suggests how a reoriented transformative humanism can inform and develop international law in an era of profound ideological, ecological, and technical challenge.

Table of Contents:

Contributors
Acknowledgments
1. Introduction: The History and Theory of the Individual in International Law, Anne Peters & Tom Sparks

1
The Individual in the History of International Law
2. The Individual in International Law in Antiquity, Eleanor Cowan
3. Individuals and Group Identity in Medieval International Law, Dante Fedele & Alain Wijffels
4. From Exemplary Individuals to Private Persons with Rights: International Law 1500-1647, Vitoria, Gentili, and Grotius, Francesca Iurlaro
5. From Re- to Demoralisation: The Individual in International Law, 1648-1789, Mark Somos
6. The Individual in International Law in the Nineteenth Century, 1789-1914, Inge Van Hulle
7. Before Human Rights: The Formation of the International Status of the Individual, 1914-1945, Anne Peters

2
The Individual in the Theory of International Law
8. Legal Positivism and the Individual in International Law, Gleider I. Hernández
9. The Individual in International Law from the Contemporary Sacred Natural Law Perspective, Rafael Domingo
10. The Individual in Secular Natural Law Theories of International Law, Tom Sparks
11. The Status of the Individual in International Law: A TWAIL Perspective, B.S. Chimni
12. The Individual in Feminist Approaches to International Law, Ruth Houghton
13. A Marxist Account of the Individual in International Law, Marina Veličković
14. Global Law and the Individual, Angelo Jr. Golia
15. Global Constitutionalism and the Individual, Başak Çalı
16. The Individual in (International) Law and Economics, Anne van Aaken
17. Individual Personhood in Anthropological Approaches to International Law, Marie-Claire Foblets
18. Conclusion: Reconsidering the Individual in International Law, Anne Peters & Tom Sparks

More info with OUP.

NEW ISSUE: Journal of the History of International Law (Volume 26, Issue 3)

Source: Brill

Articles


British Utilitarianism after Bentham: Nineteenth-Century Foundations of International Law Part II
Author:
Robert Schütze
Pages: 243–284

Unequal Treaty in Practice: A Story about Article 23 of the Treaty of Tientsin
Author:
Shiu Chung Chan
Pages: 285–311

Gender, Human Rights Networks, and the State of Emergency During the Arab Revolt (1936–1939)

Author:
Paola Zichi
Pages: 312–344

Book Review

State Responsibility and Rebels: The History and Legacy of Protecting Investment against Revolution, written by Kathryn Greenman

Author:
Filip Batselé
Pages: 345–349

Visit Brill's website for more info.

BOOK: Isaac NAKHIMOVSKY, "The Holy Alliance: Liberalism and the Politics of Federation" (Princeton University Press, 2024)

Source: PUP

Description:

The Holy Alliance is now most familiar as a label for conspiratorial reaction. In this book, Isaac Nakhimovsky reveals the Enlightenment origins of this post-Napoleonic initiative, explaining why it was embraced at first by many contemporary liberals as the birth of a federal Europe and the dawning of a peaceful and prosperous age of global progress. Examining how the Holy Alliance could figure as both an idea of progress and an emblem of reaction, Nakhimovsky offers a novel vantage point on the history of federative alternatives to the nation state. The result is a clearer understanding of the recurring appeal of such alternatives—and the reasons why the politics of federation has also come to be associated with entrenched resistance to liberalism’s emancipatory aims.

Nakhimovsky connects the history of the Holy Alliance with the better-known transatlantic history of eighteenth-century constitutionalism and nineteenth-century efforts to abolish slavery and war. He also shows how the Holy Alliance was integrated into a variety of liberal narratives of progress. From the League of Nations to the Cold War, historical analogies to the Holy Alliance continued to be drawn throughout the twentieth century, and Nakhimovsky maps how some of the fundamental political problems raised by the Holy Alliance have continued to reappear in new forms under new circumstances. Time will tell whether current assessments of contemporary federal systems seem less implausible to future generations than initial liberal expectations of the Holy Alliance do to us today.

Author:

Isaac Nakhimovsky is associate professor of history and humanities at Yale University. He is the author of The Closed Commercial State: Perpetual Peace and Commercial Society from Rousseau to Fichte (Princeton).

More info with the publisher.

BOOK: Kenneth MACK & Jacob KATZ COGAN & (eds.), "In Between and Across: Legal History Without Boundaries" (OUP, 2024)

Source: OUP

Description:

The boundaries between the history of law and the history of everything else are quite blurry nowadays. Whether one is asking questions about the origins of the carceral state, the relationship between slavery and capitalism, the history of migration flows and empires, the longer story of human rights, the building of the straight state, the role of religion in public life, or many others, there is a shared belief that law and its history matters. In fact, legal historians began to focus on the blurring of boundaries such as those between markets and politics, between identity and state power, as well as between national borders and the flows of people, capital and ideas around the world.

Legal history, broadly conceived, seems to mark much of the most exciting work that is redrawing the boundaries of historical scholarship in many areas of study. In Between and Across: Legal History without Boundaries gathers some of the newest and freshest work by both younger and established scholars who are carrying forward that project and extending it into new areas of historical inquiry. It captures the best of the new and innovative tools and questions that have made law a central plane of inquiry, charts novel directions for the field, and poses broader questions concerning the past, present, and future.

Crossing a wide variety of geographic areas (from British-ruled Australia to colonial India and Malaysia, to the United States), the authors sketch new boundaries for the field to cross - boundaries of time, geography, and method - and claim that legal history provides the language to talk across national borders.

Table of Contents:

Introduction: Rewriting the Boundaries of Legal History, Kenneth W. Mack and Jacob Katz Cogan

Part I: The Political Economy of Time

1. Views from Rathole Mountain: A Lawscape Journey through Old Virginia, Matthew Axtell

2. The Rise of Retail Stockholder Litigation and the Creation of the Plaintiff's Bar in American Business Law, 1930-1950, Donna Dennis

3. Private Law, Public Welfare, Marital Ideals, and The Gender Binary . . . or, What I Learned at the Socio-Legal Revolution, Felicia Kornbluh

4. Power of the Purse: How “the Philanthropic North” Has Helped Determine Which Individuals, Groups, and Ideas in the Black Freedom Struggle Will Thrive Nationally, Maribel Morey

5. “Kindred to Treason”: Conspiracy Laws in the United States, Sarah Seo

Part II: Law, Space, and Place in History

6. The Case as Episode: Murder and Migration in Colonial Australia, Catherine L. Evans

7. The Chain and the Rope: Illuminating Constitutional Traditions, Maeve Glass

8. South Asians at the Inns of Court: Empire, Expulsion, and Redemption circa 1900, Mitra Sharafi

Part III: Rethinking Method: Law and Everything Else

9. “Our Experiences Make Us Who We Are”: Lessons from Thomas Ruffin and Dirk Hartog, Jessica K. Lowe

10. Debtor Constitutionalism, Farah Peterson

11. Roosters and Resistance, Christina D. Ponsa-Kraus

12. Law, History, and the Interwar ACLU's Jewish Lawyers, Laura Weinrib

More info with OUP.

BOOK: Paul TUCKER, "Global Discord: Values and Power in a Fractured World Order" (Princeton University Press, 2024)

Source: PUP

Description:

Can the international economic and legal system survive today’s fractured geopolitics? Democracies are facing a drawn-out contest with authoritarian states that is entangling much of public policy with global security issues. In Global Discord, Paul Tucker lays out principles for a sustainable system of international cooperation, showing how democracies can deal with China and other illiberal states without sacrificing their deepest political values. Drawing on three decades as a central banker and regulator, Tucker applies these principles to the international monetary order, including the role of the U.S. dollar, trade and investment regimes, and the financial system.

Combining history, economics, and political and legal philosophy, Tucker offers a new account of international relations. Rejecting intellectual traditions that go back to Hobbes, Kant, and Grotius, and deploying instead ideas from David Hume, Bernard Williams, and modern mechanism-design economists, Tucker describes a new kind of political realism that emphasizes power and interests without sidelining morality. Incentives must be aligned with values if institutions are to endure. The connecting tissue for a system of international cooperation, he writes, should be legitimacy, creating a world of concentric circles in which we cooperate more with those with whom we share the most and whom we fear the least.

More information with the publisher.

BOOK: Mary BRIDGES, "Dollars and Dominion: US Bankers and the Making of a Superpower" (Princeton University Press, 2024)

Source: PUP

Description:

The dominance of US multinational businesses today can seem at first like an inevitable byproduct of the nation’s superpower status. In Dollars and Dominion, Mary Bridges tells a different origin story. She explores the ramshackle beginnings of US financial power overseas, showing that US bankers in the early twentieth century depended on the US government, European know-how, and last-minute improvisation to sustain their work abroad. Bridges focuses on an underappreciated piece of the nation’s financial infrastructure—the overseas branch bank—as a brick-and-mortar foundation for expanding US commercial influence.

Bridges explores how bankers sorted their new communities into “us”—potential clients—and “them”—local populations, who often existed on the periphery of the banking world. She argues that US bankers mapped their new communities by creating foreign credit information—and by using a financial asset newly enabled by the Federal Reserve System, the bankers’ acceptance, in the process. In doing so, they constructed a new architecture of US trade finance that relied on long-standing inequalities and hierarchies of privilege. Thus, racialized, class-based, and gendered ideas became baked into the financial infrastructure.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, there was nothing inevitable or natural about the rise of US finance capitalism. Bridges shows that US foreign banking was a bootstrapped project that began as a side hustle of Gilded Age tycoons and sustained itself by relying on the power of the US state, copying the example of British foreign bankers, and building alliances with local elites. In this way, US bankers constructed a flexible and durable new infrastructure to support the nation’s growing global power.

Mary Bridges, a historian of the twentieth-century United States, is the Ernest May Fellow in History and Policy at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.