ESIL Interest Group History of International Law

ESIL Interest Group History of International Law

Friday, 12 June 2020

BOOK: Christopher A CASEY, Nationals Abroad: Globalization, Individual Rights, and the Making of Modern International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020). ISBN 9781108489454, £ 29.99


(Source: CUP)

Cambridge University Press is publishing a new book on the history of international business interests and the creation of the international human rights regime in the late 19th and 20th century.

ABOUT THE BOOK

It is a fundamental term of the social contract that people trade allegiance for protection. In the nineteenth century, as millions of people made their way around the world, they entangled the world in web of allegiance that had enormous political consequences. Nationality was increasingly difficult to define. Just who was a national in a world where millions lived well beyond the borders of their sovereign state? As the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth, jurists and policymakers began to think of ways to cut the web of obligation that had enabled world politics. They proposed to modernize international law to include subjects other than the state. Many of these experiments failed. But, by the mid-twentieth century, an international legal system predicated upon absolute universality and operated by intergovernmental organizations came to the fore. Under this system, individuals gradually became subjects of international law outside of their personal citizenship, culminating with the establishment of international courts of human rights after the Second World War.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Christopher A. Casey, University of California, Berkeley: Christopher A. Casey received his BA, MA, PhD, and JD at the University of California, Berkeley.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction
Part I .Mise en scène: The International Legal World, 1850-–1914:
1. The Walls of Gilgamesh
2. Making Nations, Breaking Nationality
Part II. Mise en scène: The International Legal World, 1919-–1939:
3. Sovereign Nations
4. Sovereign Persons
5. Sovereign Commerce
Part III. Mise en scène: The International Legal World, 1945-–Present:
6. Cosmopolitans and Capitalists
Conclusion

More info here

(source: ESCLH Blog)