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.

CALL FOR EXPRESSION OF INTEREST: (De-/re-)constructions of International Law over Time and Space, ESIL Interest Group for the History of International Law (2025 ESIL Annual Conference on “Reconstructing International Law”, Freie Universität Berlin, 10-13 September 2025, DEADLINE: 15 January 2025)

 

Call for Expression of Interest

ESIL Interest Group on the History of International Law

Agora Panel Proposal for the ESIL Annual Conference 2025

  (De-/re-)constructions of International Law over Time and Space

Berlin, 10 to 13 September 2025

Submission deadline: 15 January 2025

The ESIL Interest Group on the History of International Law is preparing an Agora panel proposal on ‘(De-/re-)constructions of International Law over Time and Space’ for the 2025 ESIL Annual Conference “Reconstructing International Law” in Berlin, Germany. The outcome of the Agora proposal is uncertain, but the panel speakers will be invited to present at the interest group pre-conference workshop, if the Agora proposal is not selected by the conference organizers.

Themes

This Agora aims to better understand the theme of ‘reconstructing international law’ from a historical perspective: (1) What have been the causes and reasons for (re-)constructions of international law in its history? (2) How has international law fared after past major systemic crises? (3) What can we learn from institutional and normative projects of (re-)constructing ‘new’ international law in the past?

Until modern times, international relations were determined by the good will of the sovereign and force played the dominant role in these relations. There has been no agreed definition as to when ‘international law’ exactly began, but it is generally agreed that (de-/re-)construction has been a common theme in the history of international law at various moments in time, with the Westphalian Peace of 1648 being marked as one of the most famous watershed moments. The subsequent transition from European public law to international law through colonial expansion was another important moment of territorial ‘reconstruction.’ Conversely, one might inquire about the extent to which decolonization and the admission of newly independent states has led to the ‘reconstruction’ of Eurocentric international law in the 20^th century.

At the same time, reconstruction can be approached from an institutional perspective or through the historical expansion of the actors or sources of international law. One could also explore the (de-/re-) construction of international law through the rise and fall of its individual sub-disciplines or by looking at reconstruction within and across sub-disciplines. Apart from successful (de-/re-) construction, the failed attempts of various actors to (de-/re-)construct international law could provide important lessons about reform. In addition to the restructuring of international law in the history, we are also interested in papers discussing the restructuring of ‘the history of international law’ as a discipline, its theories, and methodologies.

The IG particularly encourages interdisciplinary research engaging with historical methods, such as the use of archives and other historical sources. Perspectives from underrepresented regions and critical scholars are particularly welcomed.

Submission procedure

Members of the HIL IG and other ESIL Members working on related topics are invited to express their interest in participating by sending to lamsh@vuw.leidenuniv.nl prior to the deadline the following documents:

-          An Abstract of no more than 400 words

-          Your curriculum vitae

-          Your short biography, indicating whether you are an ESIL member and whether you are applying for the ESIL Early-Career Scholar Prize

 Timeline

The deadline for expressing interest in the Agora panel proposal is 15 January 2025. We expect to inform successful applicants before 31 January 2025 if they will be part of the Proposal.

If you have any questions, feel free to contact Ocean: lamsh@vuw.leidenuniv.nl.

Please note that the Interest Group is prioritizing those who could present their papers in person. However, the Interest Group is unable to provide funding for travel and accommodation. Selected speakers will be expected to bear the costs of their own travel and accommodation. Some ESIL travel grants and ESIL carers’ grants will be available to offer partial financial support to speakers who have exhausted other potential funding sources.

Please see the ESIL website for all relevant information about the conference.

Conveners

Anastasia Hammerschmied – Florenz Volkaert - Jaanika Erne – Sze Hong Lam (Ocean)

SEMINAR SERIES: "Thinking Gender, History, & International Law" (University of Warwick/Teams, October 2024 - March 2025)

Description:

Our aim is to engage a global audience interested in critical, feminist, and postcolonial perspectives on contemporary and historical issues in international law and politics. The series aims to create a space for academic research and networking, bringing together scholars from various fields to discuss feminist and gender-centred issues in history and international law. Each session will feature a dialogue between two or more scholars to foster discussion and conversation.

Our inaugural session, "How to Write Feminist Histories of International Law?", will take place next Monday, October 21, 2024, at 5pm BST. We're thrilled to have Aoife Donoughe, Maria Drakopolou, Diane Marie Amann, and Gina Heathcote as our distinguished speakers for this session.

Full list of seminar topics:

October 21, 2024: How to Write Feminist Histories of International Law?

November 18, 2024: How to Gender the Public and Private Divide in International Law?

December 2, 2024: Women's Rights and Human Rights: Carceral Genealogies from CEDAW to Istanbul

January 13, 2025: Decolonial Methods: Gender, History and Law Through Black Literature

February 3, 2025: Decolonising Children's Rights and International Criminal Law: Human Rights Between Security and Empowerment

February 25, 2025: Gender and International Criminal Law: History, Victimhood and Transitional Justice

March 17, 2025: International Law and Colour Line: Is Palestine a Feminist Issue?

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For more information and required pre-registration, visit Warwick University's dedicated webpage.

To subscribe to the mailing list, email paola.zichi@warwick.ac.uk or Aisel.Omarova@warwick.ac.uk. 

SPECIAL ISSUE: Revista Brasileira de História & Ciências Sociais, "História do Direito Internacional" (Volume 16, Issue 32, 2024)

Source: Revista Brasileira de Historia & Ciencias Sociais

Description:

Apresentação do Volume 16 Número 32 da Revista Brasileira de História & Ciências Sociais

Denize Terezinha Leal Freitas, Fabiano Quadros Rückert, José Carlos da Silva Cardozo, Jonathan Fachini da Silva, Tiago da Silva Cesar, Wagner Silveira Feloniuk

4-5

História do Direito Internacional

Augusto Jaeger Junior, Arno Dal Ri Jr., Lucas Carlos Lima

6-10

Dossiê

Percursos do Princípio das Nacionalidades nas doutrinas belgas de Direito Internacional: do Círculo de Gante à Escola de Lovânia (1863-1953)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.14295/rbhcs.v16i32.16513

Arno Dal Ri Jr

11-53

 

A cláusula da nação mais favorecida em tratados comerciais: percepções ocidentais sobre a prática latino-americana de tratados comerciais no final do século XIX e início do século XX

DOI: https://doi.org/10.14295/rbhcs.v16i32.16576

Florenz Volkaert, Fernando Muniz Shecaira

54-87

 

A participação brasileira na elaboração do Estatuto da CPJI: o papel de Clovis Bevilaqua a Raul Fernandes

DOI: https://doi.org/10.14295/rbhcs.v16i32.16509

Lucas Carlos Lima

88-107

 

A história da construção do modelo de produção tradicional do direito internacional

DOI: https://doi.org/10.14295/rbhcs.v16i32.16665

Amina Welten Guerra

108-138

A prática dos estados asiáticos na implementação do princípio de proteção de monumentos e obras de arte antes da Primeira Guerra Mundial

DOI: https://doi.org/10.14295/rbhcs.v16i32.16429

Alice Lopes Fabris

139-158

A obra literária de Carl Schmitt durante seus anos como protagonista jurídico do nacional-socialismo (1933-1936): uma sobreposição entre os escritos e os fatos

DOI: https://doi.org/10.14295/rbhcs.v16i32.16602

Marcelo Markus Teixeira

159-181

Decolonizing International Law: between demystifications and resignifications

DOI: https://doi.org/10.14295/rbhcs.v16i32.16555

Tatiana de A. F. R. Cardoso Squeff, Gabriel Pedro Dassoler Damasceno

182-205

 

O peticionamento das vítimas de violações de direitos humanos no sistema convencional das nações unida

DOI: https://doi.org/10.14295/rbhcs.v16i32.16529

Cristina Figueiredo Terezo Ribeiro, Thaís Magno

206-245

 

De objetivos universais a resultados locais: apontamentos para uma história da proteção regional aos direitos humanos

DOI: https://doi.org/10.14295/rbhcs.v16i32.16586

Alexander de Castro

246-269

 

Direitos africanos dos Direitos Humanos – análise desde a perspectiva jurídico-histórica

DOI: https://doi.org/10.14295/rbhcs.v16i32.16565

João Francisco

270-298

 

A talidomida no banco dos réus: o julgamento de Alsdorf (Alemanha, 1968) a partir da imprensa brasileira

DOI: https://doi.org/10.14295/rbhcs.v16i32.16582

Francieli Lunelli Santos

299-323

 

A Resiliência da Identidade: Indigenato e a Virada Histórica no Direito Internacional

DOI: https://doi.org/10.14295/rbhcs.v16i32.16369

Lucas Lixinski

324-354

 

O Supremo Acordo: usos jurídicos do passado da Anistia no julgamento da Arguição de Descumprimento de Preceito Fundamental n. 153

DOI: https://doi.org/10.14295/rbhcs.v16i32.16715

Ilanil Coelho, Pedro Odainai

355-390

 

Interesses políticos na evolução histórica do Direito Internacional dos Refugiados e no caso ucraniano: entre humanitarismo e seletividade na prática europeia

DOI: https://doi.org/10.14295/rbhcs.v16i32.16537

Augusto Jaeger Junior, Ricardo Strauch Aveline

391-420

 

Das contribuições de Francisco de Vitória ao necessário giro epistemológico para as Américas: o Direito Internacional redimensionado a partir do Sul Global

DOI: https://doi.org/10.14295/rbhcs.v16i32.16568

Thiago Giovani Romero, Wanda Helena Mendes Muniz Falcão, Vinicius Villani Abrantes

421-438

 

O solidarismo de Hugo Grócio como princípio normativo de um constitucionalismo transnacional no século XXI

DOI: https://doi.org/10.14295/rbhcs.v16i32.16724

Anderson Vichinkeski Teixeira

More info with the publisher.