ESIL Interest Group History of International Law

ESIL Interest Group History of International Law

Friday 23 December 2016

JOURNAL: Grotiana XXXVII (2016), No. 1

(image source: Brill)

Grotiana (Brill) published the first issue of its 37th volume.

Table of contents:
The Restless Mind and the Living Text (Douglas J. Osler)
Grotius and English Charters (James Muldoon)
Grotius, Informal Empire and the Conclusion of Unequal Treaties (Inge Van Hulle)
Hugo Grotius’s Hermeneutics of Natural and Divine Law (Stefanie Ertz)
Roman Law in the State of Nature (Jacob Giltaij)

More information on the publisher's website.

Thursday 15 December 2016

BOOK: Doglas HOWLAND, International Law and Japanese Sovereignty. The Emerging Global Order in the 19th Century. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, XI +232 p. ISBN 978-1-137-57108-3

(image source: palgrave)


Book abstract:
How does a nation become a great power? A global order was emerging in the nineteenth century, one in which all nations were included. This book explores the multiple legal grounds of Meiji Japan's assertion of sovereign statehood within that order: natural law, treaty law, international administrative law, and the laws of war. Contrary to arguments that Japan was victimized by 'unequal' treaties, or that Japan was required to meet a 'standard of civilization' before it could participate in international society, Howland argues that the Westernizing Japanese state was a player from the start. In the midst of contradictions between law and imperialism, Japan expressed state will and legal acumen as an equal of the Western powers – international incidents in Japanese waters, disputes with foreign powers on Japanese territory, and the prosecution of interstate war. As a member of international administrative unions, Japan worked with fellow members to manage technical systems such as the telegraph and the post. As a member of organizations such as the International Law Association and as a leader at the Hague Peace Conferences, Japan helped to expand international law. By 1907, Japan was the first non-western state to join the ranks of the great powers.
On the author:
Douglas Howland is the Buck Professor of Chinese History at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, USA. He is the author of four books and co-editor (with Luise White) of The State of Sovereignty: Territories, Laws, Populations (2009).

Table of contents:
International Legal Grounds for State Sovereignty
The Family of Nations and Conflict of Laws
Territorial Sovereignty and Extraterritorial Privilege
The Alternative Order of International Administration
Mastering the International Laws of War
Japan Among the Great Powers

CONFERENCE: ‘A Violent World? Changes and Limits to Large-Scale Violence in Early Modernity’ (Oxford, 29 June-1 July 2017) DEADLINE 31 DEC 2016

(image source: Oxford University)


The University of Oxford's Centre for Global History organizes a conference on violence in early modernity.

Conference description:
This conference brings global approaches to the history of violence, reassessing the nature of violence during the early modern period. Using violence and the restraint of violence as a unifying theme, participants are encouraged to make trans-national comparisons and connections across the early modern world. 
An abstract of 400 words, accompanied by a short (two-page) CV, should be submitted to globalviolence@history.ox.ac.uk by 31 December 2016. 
The history of violence and its restraint has been crucial to definitions of ‘Western civilization’ and the modern world, often by contrasting them with barbaric predecessors and the cultures that they claim to have tamed. Yet, evidence for the restraint of violence varies according to one’s viewpoint: the sharp decline of homicide in seventeenth-century Europe, for example, diverges from the simultaneous rise in violence of Atlantic colonial societies. As histories of violence and restraint are usually written from national and nationalist perspectives, this conference brings global approaches to the study of violence in order to probe historical assumptions about the limits of violence and its decline during the early modern period. It thereby also questions narratives of the inexorable rise of the nation-state alongside historical periodization of the ‘early modern’ and ‘modern.’ 
Recent historical approaches to violence, shaped by the cultural turn, have tended to focus on inter-personal violence and its patterns in civil society. This conference will integrate warfare and other crucial forms of large-scale violence with recent scholarship on the history of collective and inter-individual violence. By examining large-scale, organized violence alongside broader social and cultural patterns, this conference will explore the boundaries between ‘war’ and ‘violence’, as well as how they relate to ideas of morality, social order, law, and political legitimacy in the early modern world. We encourage scholars to address contemporary perceptions of violence and its restraint, framing analysis through thematic, rather than geographic, approaches. 
Given that we are encouraging scholars to probe assumptions about historical periods, our definition of ‘early modern’ is purposefully flexible.
Confirmed speakers include: Wayne Lee, Alan McFarlane, Stuart Carroll, Pratyay Nath, Brian Sandberg, Cecile Vidal, Lauren Benton, Adam Clulow, Simon Layton, Richard Reid, and James Belich.
We welcome papers that address:
- Global comparisons and indicators of violence
- Definitions of organized violence and crime, such as banditry and piracy
- Linkages between organized, collective and interpersonal violence
- Law’s penetration into oceanic, battlefield, domestic, and/or other novel arenas
- The nature of extra-territorial violence
- Actual practices of violence
- Toleration and restraint of violence
- Methods of measurement, used by contemporaries and/or historians, in assessing what is or was appropriate
We particularly welcome papers on violence in regions not covered by confirmed speakers, such as China, Russia, the Ottoman Empire, and Africa.
Organisation:
Peter H. Wilson, Chichele Professor of the History of War, University of Oxford
Marie Houllemare, Institut Universitaire de France, Université d’Amiens (CHSSC)
Erica Charters, Oxford Centre for Global History Centre, University of Oxford