Moritz MIHATSCH & Michael MULLIGAN, "Shifting Sovereignties A Global History of a Concept in Practice" (De Gruyter, 2025)

Source: De Gruyter

Description:

Shifting Sovereignties explores practical manifestations of sovereignty from antiquity to the Anthropocene. Taking a global-history perspective and centring Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, it destabilises overly neat theoretical notions of the concept. Shifting Sovereignties shows that, in practice, sovereignty is far from absolute, perpetual, indivisible, or supreme; rather it is fuzzy, compromised, fragmented, and layered. From these observations, the authors derive a historical conceptualisation which makes change and contingency core aspects of the understanding of sovereignty. Rather than understanding sovereignty as a characteristic of individual states, Mihatsch and Mulligan propose the notion of “sovereignty regimes”: frameworks of legitimation enforced through mutual recognition. These regimes are created and managed by more or less institutionalised structures which embody what the authors call “system sovereignty.” Sovereignty regimes and system sovereignty are, like sovereignty itself, continuously changing and contingent. This process of change forms the core of the book. Shifting Sovereignties thus contributes a practical, historical perspective on a concept which is foundational in political science, international relations, and international law.

Author / Editor information


Moritz A. Mihatsch, University of Cambridge, UK; Michael R. Mulligan, Euro University of Bahrain.


I An Impractical Concept

Part 1: Many Beginnings

Introduction

II Sovereignty before Sovereignty

III The Inventors of Sovereignty

IV The Ascendance of Sovereignty

Part 2: Illusions of Coherence

Introduction

V Imperial Entanglements

VI The Fog of War

VII The Dawn of Decolonisation

Part 3: A Man in the Desert

Introduction

VIII Sovereignty on Ice

IX The (Dead) End of Sovereignty

X The Mummy Returns

XI Quo Vadis, Sovereignty?

Bibliography

Index

Alisson POWERS, "Arbitrating Empire: United States Expansion and the Transformation of International Law" (Oxford Legal History, 2024, OUP)

Source: OUP

Description:

• Traces how ordinary people used international law to hold the United States accountable for state violence during the first decades of the twentieth century
• Shows how key transformations in the legal architecture of the early twentieth-century United States Empire were the product of efforts to insulate the US government from international scrutiny
• Rethinks histories of the Monroe and Calvo Doctrines in the Americas
• Offers a new way of understanding formations of modern international law through attention to erasure in legal archives

Arbitrating Empire offers a new history of the emergence of the United States as a global power-one shaped as much by attempts to insulate the US government from international legal scrutiny as it was by efforts to project influence across the globe. Drawing on extensive archival research in the United States, Mexico, Panama, and the United Kingdom, the book traces how thousands of dispossessed residents of US-annexed territories petitioned international Claims Commissions between the 1870s and the 1930s to charge the United States with violating international legal protections for life and property.

Through attention to the consequences of their unexpected claims, Allison Powers demonstrates how colonized subjects, refugees from slavery, and migrant workers transformed a series of tribunals designed to establish the legality of US imperial interventions into sites through which to challenge the legitimacy of US colonial governance. One of the first social histories of international law, the book argues that contests over meanings of sovereignty and state responsibility that would reshape the mid-twentieth-century international order were waged not only at diplomatic conferences, but also in Arizona copper mines, Texas cotton fields, Samoan port cities, Cuban sugar plantations, and the locks and stops of the Panama Canal.

Arbitrating Empire uncovers how ordinary people used international law to hold the United States accountable for state-sanctioned violence during the decades when the nation was first becoming a global empire-and demonstrates why State Department attempts to erase their claims transformed international law in ways that continue to shield the US government from liability to this day.

Table of Contents:

Introduction: The Subjects of International Law

Part I: Dispossessions
Chapter 1: Arbitrating Debt
Chapter 2: Arbitrating War
Chapter 3: Arbitrating Citizenship
Part II: Exposures
Chapter 4: The World's Easement
Chapter 5: Dangerous Precedents
Part III: Foreclosures
Chapter 6: Sovereign Inequalities
Chapter 7: The Specter of Compensation

Conclusion: Life and Property

More info with OUP.

BOOK: Alberto RINALDI, "Ghosts of International Law: The Figure of the Foreign Fighter in a Cultural Perspective" (Cambridge Studies in International and Comparative Law, CUP, 2024)

Source: CUP

Description:

Heroes and villains, idealists and mercenaries, freedom fighters and religious fanatics. Foreign fighters tend to defy easy classification. Good and bad images of the foreign combatant epitomize different conceptions of freedom and are used to characterize the rightness or wrongness of this actor in civil wars. The book traces the history of these figures and their afterlife. It does so through an interdisciplinary methodology employing law, history, and psychoanalytical theory, showing how different images of the foreign combatant are utilized to proscribe or endorse foreign fighters in different historical moments. By linking the Spanish, Angolan, and Syrian civil wars, the book demonstrates how these figures function as a precedent for later periods and how their heritage keeps haunting the imaginary of legal actors in the present.

• Provides an interdisciplinary account of international law-making, with specific reference to violent non-state actors
• Introduces the theory step-by-step using ordinary-language explanations and examples throughout
• Portrays a different story of foreign volunteering and offers a window on the constitutive role of cultural archetypes in international law

Table of Contents:

Introduction

1. The Spanish Civil war and the legacy of Nineteenth Century adventurers

2. The return of the mercenaries: The 1976 Luanda trial in context

3. Enemies of humanity or freedom fighters? The Jihadist combatant in the Syrian Civil war

Back to the Future

Bibliography

Index.

Author

Alberto Rinaldi, Lunds Universitet, Sweden

Alberto Rinaldi has worked for academic and non-academic institutions in Egypt, France, and currently Sweden. His research focuses on interdisciplinary approaches to law and the humanities, including law and emotions, literature, cinema, and pop culture.

More info with CUP.

BOOK: Mark SOMOS et al, "The Unseen History of International Law: A Census Bibliography of Hugo Grotius' De Jure Belli Ac Pacis (1625-1650 Editions), (The History and Theory of International Law, OUP, 2025)

Source: OUP

Description:

• The first global census bibliography of Hugo Grotius' De iure belli ac pacis
• Describes nearly one thousand surviving copies of the first nine editions of De iure belli ac pacis published between 1625 and 1650
• Examines annotations left by four centuries of readers
• Draws from previously unknown primary evidence to revise and expand our understanding of international law

The Unseen History of International Law locates and describes almost one thousand surviving copies of the first nine editions of Hugo Grotius' De iure belli ac pacis (IBP) published between 1625 and 1650. Meticulously reconstructing the publishing history of these first nine editions and cataloguing copies across hundreds of collections, The Unseen History provides fundamental data for reconstructing the impact of IBP across time and space. It also examines annotations that thousands of owners and readers have left in IBP copies over four centuries, offering original insights into the development of international law.

Grotius' De iure belli ac pacis has been commonly regarded as the foundation of modern international law since its first appearance in 1625. Most major international law scholars have engaged with IBP, often owning and richly annotating their own copies. At key moments - including the demise of the Holy Roman Empire, the fall of Napoleon, and the end of both world wars - IBP was reissued with new commentaries by multinational projects devoted to restarting the international order. Despite the enormous literature on IBP's reception and influence, we cannot fully understand its impact without uncovering the history of IBP as a physical object, with hundreds of thousands of unpublished annotations arguing or agreeing with the text, updating and adapting its contents.

Approaching Grotius' seminal work as a physical vehicle of the author's, the publishers', owners', and readers' engagement, The Unseen History radically expands and revises our understanding not only of IBP, but also of the academic discipline and lived practice of modern international law over the last four centuries. In addition to delving into the first nine editions' printing history, descriptive bibliography, and both Grotius' and the publishers' marketing and donation strategies, the book explores Grotius' subsequent impact on pro-slavery and abolitionist litigation as a case study of how the census' original findings can be applied to specific areas of reception.

Table of Contents:


1:General Introduction
PART ONE: WRITING AND PRINTING IBP
2:1625. States and New Findings
3:1626. Pirated but Improved
4:1631. Large-Format and Long-Prepared
5:1632. The Janssonius Piracy
6:1632. The Blaeu Reprisal
7:1642. Annotata: Philemon and Posterity
8:1646. The First Posthumous Edition
9:1647. Re-issuing the 1631 Edition
10:1650. After Westphalia
PART TWO: OWNERS AND READERS OF THE IBP
11:Ownership Patterns of the 1625 IBP
12:Ownership Patterns of the 1626 IBP
13:Ownership Patterns of the 1631 IBP
14:Ownership Patterns of the 1632 Janssonius IBP
15:Ownership Patterns of the 1632 Blaeu IBP
16:Ownership Patterns of the 1642 IBP
17:Ownership Patterns of the 1646 IBP
18:Ownership Patterns of the 1647 IBP
19:Ownership Patterns of the 1650 IBP
20:Patterns in the 1625-1650 Editions
21:IBP and Censorship
22:Testing the Census: The Case of Slavery
23:Conclusion
PART THREE: THE CATALOGUE
24:The 1625 IBP Copies
25:The 1626 IBP Copies
26:The 1631 IBP Copies
27:The 1632 Janssonius IBP Copies
28:The 1632 Blaeu IBP Copies
29:The IBP 1642 IBP Copies
30:The 1646 IBP Copies
31:The 1647 IBP Copies
32:The 1650 IBP Copies
Appendix 1: Printer's Corrections in the 1631 IBP
Appendix 2: List of Co-Bound Copies by Edition
Bibliography

Authors:

Mark Somos is Heisenberg Professor at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law, serving as Principal Investigator of the Grotius Census Project. He holds a PhD in Political Science from Harvard and a PhD in Law from Leiden. As a scholar, Mark taught at Sussex, Harvard, Yale, and Tufts universities. He has published six books and eighty articles and co-edits Grotiana and the book series History of European Political and Constitutional Thought. As a lawyer, Mark advises States, individuals, and NGOs, has served as Counsel in several ICJ cases, and has successfully represented victims in front of multiple UN Special Procedures.

Matthew Cleary is a Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law where he studies legal history, having received his PhD in Law at Edinburgh Law School in 2023 on late medieval testamentary succession law. Prior to this, he studied in Canada, receiving a BA Specialization Honours in History from Laurentian University, and an MA in History from the University of Western Ontario. He has authored (or co-authored) multiple articles and book chapters, which have appeared in Forum Historiae Iuris, Grotiana, and Routledge, with several forthcoming publications.

Pablo Dufour is a research assistant at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law. He is currently pursuing an MSc in International Relations at the London School of Economics. He holds a BA from the University of Heidelberg, having spent the final year of his undergraduate studies at Sciences Po Paris.

Edward Jones Corredera is a Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law, and is Assistant Lecturer at the Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia. He received his PhD in History from the University of Cambridge in 2019. His articles have appeared in the English Historical Review, the Journal of Early Modern History, and Global Intellectual History. He has been a Fellow at the Huntington Library and the Residencia de Estudiantes, and is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

Emanuele Salerno is Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law. He holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Pisa and his current research is centred on theoretical and practical tools for supporting international peace and security in a historical comparative framework. Before joining the MPIL, he has contributed to the Italian research units of the international projects Natural Law 1625-1850 and Serica. He has published on the legal-political culture of the ruling class and cases of pragmatization of the law of nature and nations in eighteenth-century Tuscany.

BOOK: Aurora ALMADA DE SANTOS & Yvette SANTOS (eds.), "The League of Nations Experience: Overlapping Readings" (De Gruyter, 2025)

Source: De Gruyter

Description:

As an early experiment in the creation of multilateral institutions, the League of Nations was entrusted by its members to maintain peace but also to be a standard-maker and a manager of contemporary problems and challenges requiring a global response. Nevertheless, after a while it became clear that its performance in addressing major conflicts did not live up to the expectations of guarantying collective security. In the functional areas, although the organization created precedents, it also showed limitations. Due to its complexity, increasingly the League of Nations has been studied not only from an institutional perspective but also from a more multidimensional and comparative point of view that allows to consider the presence and role of the organization in various scales and spaces, besides its relationship with a diversity of actors and themes. The League of Nations Experience: Overlapping Readings offers a multitude of interpretations, evincing some of the promising avenues through which the League of Nations continues to inspire academic research.

Table of Contents:

Introduction – The League of Nations experience: Overlapping readings
Aurora Almada e Santos

A contentious idea

The Institut de Droit International’s response to the birth of the League of Nations
Philippe Rygiel
25

The League of Nations or European federation: The Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom’s decade of debate over a “United States of Europe,” 1923–1933
Rebecca Shriver
43

Hopes and aspirations

Korea and the League of Nations: from Versailles to the Manchurian Crisis, 1919–1933
Dolf-Alexander Neuhaus
67

The accession of British colonies to the League of Nations and the “Third” British Empire
Thomas Gidney
95

The membership of the Executive Council: Portugal’s highest aspiration in the League of Nations
Jesús Bermejo Roldán and Quintino Lopes
123

Decentering the view

Plowshares into swords: The League of Nations as a weapon of internationalist war
David Ekbladh
145

Survived on sufferance: Social policy, the ILO and the new “World Organisation,” 1941–1945
Geert Van Goethem
171

A plethora of varied initiatives

The Information Section of the League of Nations: An experiment in organising communication in international relations
Arne L. Gellrich and Erik Koenen
199

The League and the world: how and why the League of Nations became the centre of world economic statistics
Martin Bemmann
223

The fight against the trafficking of women and minors before and within the League of Nations: A path to legitimacy for European voluntary associations
Sara Ercolani
249

Abstracts
275

List of contributors
279

Index
285

Source: De Gruyter

BOOK: Randall LESAFFER & Anne PETERS, "The Cambridge History of International Law" (Volume I, 2024, Cambridge University Press)

Source: CUP

Description:

Volume I of The Cambridge History of International Law introduces the historiography of international law as a field of scholarship. After a general introduction to the purposes and design of the series, Part 1 of this volume highlights the diversity of the field in terms of methodologies, disciplinary approaches, and perspectives that have informed both older and newer historiographies in the recent three decades of its rapid expansion. Part 2 surveys the history of international legal history writing from different regions of the world, spanning roughly the past two centuries. The book therefore offers the most complete treatment of the historical development and current state of international law history writing, using both a global and an interdisciplinary perspectives.

• Introduces The Cambridge History of International Law series
• Offers a wide ranging survey of the historiography of international law from a global perspective
• Addresses the contributions of various disciplines – law, history, political thought, economics – and regional traditions to the historiography of international law

Table of Contents:

1. Scope, scale and humility in the history of international law 

Randall Lesaffer
Part I. The Historiography of International Law: Methods and Approaches 

Randall Lesaffer and Anne Peters
2. A thousand flowers blooming, or the desert of the real? International Law and its many problems of history 

Nehal Bhuta
3. Political thought and the historiography of international law 

Mark Somos
4. The turn to the history of international law in the discipline of international relations 

Giovanni Mantilla and Carsten-Andreas Schulz
5. Economic history and international law: a peculiar absence 

Christopher Casey
Part II. The Historiography of International Law: Regional Traditions 

Randall Lesaffer and Anne Peters
6. The historiography of international law in East Asia 

Keun-Gwan Lee
7. The historiography of international law in sub-Saharan Africa

Inge Van Hulle
8. The historiography of international law on the European continent 

Frederik Dhondt
9. The historiography of international law in Russia and its successor states 

Lauri Mälksoo
10. 'The most neglected province': British historiography of international law 

David Armitage and Ignacio de la Rasilla
11. The view from the Leviathan: history of international law in the hegemon 

John Fabian Witt
12. Using history in Latin America 

Arnulf Becker Lorca

More info with CUP.

BOOK: Thomas BOTTELIER & Jan STÖCKMANN, "Instruments of international order: Internationalism and diplomacy, 1900–50" (Manchester University Press, 2024)

Description:

This book explores a set of diplomatic practices and principles that shaped international politics during the first half of the twentieth century. By considering these instruments as historical constructions serving various political ends, the chapters show how internationalists interacted with traditional diplomatic actors, thus blending new and old forms of diplomacy. To illustrate this process, the authors draw on a range of new archival evidence and consider understudied actors and venues, from Ethiopian diplomats to the League of Nations Assembly. What connects them is their attention to the ways in which internationalists sought to solve international problems at an international level by infiltrating established institutions at the highest level of political decision-making.

Table of Contents:

Introduction
By: Thomas W. Bottelier and Jan Stöckmann
Pages: 1–16

Chapter 1: Becoming national
Self-determination as a tool in international politics
By: Georgios Giannakopoulos
Pages: 17–34

Chapter 2: The League of Nations and the new uses of sovereignty
By: Lukas Schemper
Pages: 35–54

Chapter 3: Ascertaining the truth in Albania
Inquiry as a League of Nations instrument of international order
By: Quincy R. Cloet
Pages: 55–80

Chapter 4: The chemical weapons discourse as an instrument of international order
The Second Italo-Ethiopian War
By: Anneleen van der Meer
Pages: 81–103

Chapter 5: ‘Weapons misused by barbarous races'
Disarmament, imperialism and race in the interwar period
By: Daniel Stahl
Pages: 104–126

Chapter 6: Colonial policy and international control
The American Philippines and multilateral drug treaties, 1909–31
By: Eva Ward
Pages: 127–151

Chapter 7: In the eyes of the world
Media oversight and diplomatic practices at the League of Nations Assembly
By: Robert Laker
Pages: 152–176

Chapter 8: The League of Nations and the advisory opinion of the Permanent Court of International Justice as ‘preventive adjudication’?
By: Gabriela A. Frei
Pages: 177–197

Chapter 9: With or without the metropole
Deferred sovereignty as instrument of racial governance
By: Pablo de Orellana
Pages: 198–226

Index
Pages: 227–232

More info with manchesterhive.

BOOK: Stefanie GÄNGER & Jürgen OSTERHAMMEL (eds.), "Rethinking Global History" (CUP, 2024)

Source: CUP

Description:

Despite three decades of rapid expansion and public success, global history's theoretical and methodological foundations remain under-conceptualised, even to those using them. In this collection of essays, leading historians provide a reassessment of global history's most common analytical instruments, metaphors and conceptual foundations. Rethinking Global History prompts historians to pause and think about the methodology and premises underpinning their work. The volume reflects on the structure and direction of history, its relation to our present and the ways in which historians should best explain, contextualise and represent events and circumstances in the past. In chapters on fundamental concepts such as scale, comparison, temporality and teleology, this collection will guide readers to assess the extant literature critically and write theoretically informed global histories. Taken together, these essays provide a unique and much-needed assessment of the implications of history going global. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

Reviews

‘In this book a group of well-known practitioners provide a multifaceted analysis of the concepts, methods, and issues that will define future scholarship in Global History. If this branch of history is here to stay, then historians should embrace the full conceptual rearmament here discussed to write histories worthy of the problems affecting today's world.’Giorgio Riello, European University Institute and the University of Warwick

‘What a timely intervention! As global history is coming of age, and as the world around us changes, our methods and approaches will have to develop as well. As the talk of de-globalization proliferates, Jürgen Osterhammel and Stefanie Gänger have assembled a group of first-class historians to rethink global history for our times. Fresh, insightful, stimulating.’Sebastian Conrad, Professor of Global History, Freie Universität Berlin

Table of Contents:

Introduction
pp 1-20
Rethinking History, Globally
By Stefanie Gänger, Jürgen Osterhammel

Part I - Forms of Inquiry and Argumentation
pp 21-114

1 - Explanation
pp 23-46
The Limits of Narrativism in Global History
By Jürgen Osterhammel

Select 2 - Comparison
2 - Comparison
pp 47-69
Its Use and Misuse in Social and Economic History
By Alessandro Stanziani

3 - Time
pp 70-91
Temporality in Global History
By Christina Brauner

4 - Quantification
pp 92-114
Measuring Connections and Comparative Development in Global History
By Pim de Zwart

Part II - Concepts and Metaphors
pp 115-182

5 - The Global and the Earthy
pp 117-138
Taking the Planet Seriously as a Global Historian
By Sujit Sivasundaram

6 - Openness and Closure
pp 139-160
Spheres and Other Metaphors of Boundedness in Global History
By Valeska Huber

7 - Scales
pp 161-182
From Shipworms to the Globe and Back
By Dániel Margócsy

Part III - Configurations and Telos
pp 183-273

8 - Tacit Directionality
pp 185-209
Processes, Teleology and Contingency in Global History*
By Jan C. Jansen

Select 9 - Distance
9 - Distance
pp 210-234
A Problem in Global History
By Jeremy Adelman

10 - Materiality
pp 235-253
Global History and the Material World*
By Stefanie Gänger

11 - Centrisms
pp 254-273
Questions of Privilege and Perspective in Global Historical Scholarship
By Dominic Sachsenmaier

More info with CUP.

BOOK: Scott LINCICOME & Clark PACKARD (eds.), "Defending Globalization: Facts and Myths about the Global Economy and its Fundamental Humanity" (Cato Institute, 2024)

Source: Barnes & Noble

Description:

Original essays about the ideas and facts underlying globalization, rebutting the most common arguments against globalization today and educating readers on the intersection of globalization and our societies and cultures.

The COVID-19 pandemic, war in Ukraine, simmering US-China tensions, and rising global populism have led to globalization facing renewed attention—and criticism—from politicians and pundits across the political spectrum. Like any market phenomenon, the free movement of people, things, money, and ideas across natural or political borders is imperfect and often disruptive. But it has also produced undeniable benefits—for the United States and the world—that no other system can match. And it’s been going on since the dawn of recorded history.

The original essays from both Cato Institute scholars and outside contributors compiled in this volume offer a diverse range of perspectives on globalization—what it is, what it has produced, what its alternatives are, and what people think about it—and offer a strong, proactive case for more global integration in the years ahead.

Covering the basic economic and political ideas and historical facts underlying globalization, rebutting the most common arguments against globalization today, and educating readers on the intersection of globalization and our societies and cultures—from where we live to what clothes we wear and what foods we eat—Defending Globalization will not just educate and entertain readers but also demonstrate the essential humanity of international trade and migration—and why the United States and the rest of the world need more of it.

Contributors include Deirdre N. McCloskey, James Bacchus, Johan Norberg, Daniel W. Drezner, Jeb Hensarling, Marian L. Tupy, and Tom G. Palmer.

About the editors

Scott Lincicome is the vice president of general economics and the Herbert A. Stiefel Center for Trade Policy Studies at the Cato Institute. He is also a senior visiting lecturer at Duke University Law School, where he has taught a course on international trade law and previously taught international trade policy as a visiting lecturer. Lincicome has written on numerous economic issues, including international trade; subsidies and industrial policy; manufacturing and global supply chains; economic dynamism; and regulation. Prior to joining Cato, Lincicome spent two decades practicing international trade law. He is the editor of Empowering the New American Worker: Market-Based Solutions for Today’s Workforce (2022).

Clark Packard is a research fellow in the Herbert A. Stiefel Center for Trade Policy Studies at the Cato Institute. He was previously a resident fellow at the R Street Institute focusing on international trade policy. Packard is a contributor to Foreign Policy and has written for National Review, Lawfare, The Bulwark, Business Insider, the National Interest, and other publications.

More info with the Cato Institute.

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.

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

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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.

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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.

BOOK: Philip STERN, "Empire, Incorporated: The Corporations That Built British Colonialism" (Harvard University Press, 2023)

Source: HUP

Description:

Across four centuries, from Ireland to India, the Americas to Africa and Australia, British colonialism was above all the business of corporations. Corporations conceived, promoted, financed, and governed overseas expansion, making claims over territory and peoples while ensuring that British and colonial society were invested, quite literally, in their ventures. Colonial companies were also relentlessly controversial, frequently in debt, and prone to failure. The corporation was well-suited to overseas expansion not because it was an inevitable juggernaut but because, like empire itself, it was an elusive contradiction: public and private; person and society; subordinate and autonomous; centralized and diffuse; immortal and precarious; national and cosmopolitan—a legal fiction with very real power.

Breaking from traditional histories in which corporations take a supporting role by doing the dirty work of sovereign states in exchange for commercial monopolies, Philip Stern argues that corporations took the lead in global expansion and administration. Whether in sixteenth-century Ireland and North America or the Falklands in the early 1980s, corporations were key players. And, as Empire, Incorporated makes clear, venture colonialism did not cease with the end of empire. Its legacies continue to raise questions about corporate power that are just as relevant today as they were 400 years ago.

Challenging conventional wisdom about where power is held on a global scale, Stern complicates the supposedly firm distinction between private enterprise and the state, offering a new history of the British Empire, as well as a new history of the corporation.

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BOOK: Patrick QUINTON-BROWN, "Intervention before Interventionism: A Global Genealogy" (OUP, 2024)

Source: OUP

Description:

Intervention before Interventionism is about the ways in which statespeople have reordered intervention and non-intervention since the middle of the twentieth century. It is concerned primarily with non-Western contestations of Western-dominated order; it illustrates institutional change in and through decolonization; and it provides a conceptual roadmap for understanding dilemmas of intervention and non-intervention today, particularly in relation to contestation as it has re-emerged in the twenty-first century. While building on and conversing with existing literature, the book stands out from previous approaches insofar as it is a mapping of international struggles for the reconstitution of intervention in the globalization of the society of states.

Table of Contents:

Introduction
1 Reconstituting intervention: Contestation and the Princeton Conference
2 Dictatorial intervention and the UN Charter
3 Anti-colonial intervention and the Bandung Spirit
4 ‘Friendly’ intervention and the Special Committee
5 Emancipatory intervention and the New International Orders
6 Liberal intervention and the Responsibilities to Protect
Epilogue

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BOOK: Christopher MEISSNER, "One From the Many: The Global Economy Since 1850" (OUP, 2024)

Source: OUP

Description:

Amid a recent surge in arguments that the global economy has begun to "de-globalize," a question has emerged: will globalization survive? In One from the Many: The Global Economy since 1850, Christopher M. Meissner argues that based on the long-run of history, globalization will not be easily vanquished.

This brief introduction to the economic history of the global economy and the process of globalization since 1850 tracks and explains changes in international trade, migration, and capital flows over time. All key indicators of globalization rose between 1850 and 1914 during the first wave of globalization. Between 1918 and 1939 the global economy stagnated, suffering a momentous collapse during the Great Depression of the 1930s. After World War II, the global economy re-emerged and integration deepened.

A long-run view suggests that rising integration and growth of global economy can generate economic benefits and raise welfare. Given these lessons, the global economy will almost surely survive and integration will continue to grow. However, globalization can only survive if humanity continues to recognize its common interests and the untapped potential of further integration. At the same time, the potential adverse effects of greater integration must be acknowledged, mitigated, and minimized. Meissner's brief history of the global economy offers economics, political science, and history students a new perspective on the history of its subject matter, with an eye on a future where globalization has the potential to persist as an integrative force.

Table of Contents:

Chapter 1 Introduction

Chapter 2 The Very Long Run: 10,000 BCE - 1820 CE

Chapter 3 The Great Specialization: 1820 -1914

Chapter 4 International Investment, 1820 -1914

Chapter 5 Inter-dependence and Instability in the Classical Gold Standard Era

Chapter 6 The Great Migrations

Chapter 7 The Beginning of the End: Backlash to the First Wave of Globalization

Chapter 8 World War I and its Legacy (Prologue to the Great Depression): 1914-1928

Chapter 9 The Great Depression: An Unprecedented International Economic Crisis

Chapter 10 Rebuilding the World Economy (yet, again)

Chapter 11 The Global Economy in the Post-War Era

Chapter 12 The Bretton Woods System - A New Regime

Chapter 13 International Financial Flows and Financial Crises after the End of the Bretton Woods System

Chapter 14 The International Economy since 2000: Hyperglobalization and Beyond

Chapter 15 Prospects for the Global Economy in the 21st Century

References

Christopher M. Meissner is professor of economics at the University of California, Davis and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

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BOOK: Randall LESAFFER & Anne PETERS (eds), "The Cambridge History of International Law. Volume 1. The Historiography of International Law" (The Cambridge History of International Law, Cambridge University Press, 2024)

Source: CUP

Description:

Volume I of The Cambridge History of International Law introduces the historiography of international law as a field of scholarship. After a general introduction to the purposes and design of the series, Part 1 of this volume highlights the diversity of the field in terms of methodologies, disciplinary approaches, and perspectives that have informed both older and newer historiographies in the recent three decades of its rapid expansion. Part 2 surveys the history of international legal history writing from different regions of the world, spanning roughly the past two centuries. The book therefore offers the most complete treatment of the historical development and current state of international law history writing, using both a global and an interdisciplinary perspective.

Introduces The Cambridge History of International Law series

Offers a wide ranging survey of the historiography of international law from a global perspective

Addresses the contributions of various disciplines – law, history, political thought, economics – and regional traditions to the historiography of international law

Table of Contents

1. Scope, scale and humility in the history of international law 

Randall Lesaffer

Part I. 

The Historiography of International Law: Methods and Approaches Randall Lesaffer and Anne Peters

2. A thousand flowers blooming, or the desert of the real? International Law and its many problems of history 

Nehal Bhuta

3. Political thought and the historiography of international law

Mark Somos

4. The turn to the history of international law in the discipline of international relations 

Giovanni Mantilla and Carsten-Andreas Schulz

5. Economic history and international law: a peculiar absence 

Christopher Casey

Part II. The Historiography of International Law: Regional Traditions 

Randall Lesaffer and Anne Peters

6. The historiography of international law in East Asia 

Keun-Gwan Lee

7. The historiography of international law in sub-Saharan Africa 

Inge Van Hulle

8. The historiography of international law on the European continent

Frederik Dhondt

9. The historiography of international law in Russia and its successor states

Lauri Mälksoo

10. 'The most neglected province': British historiography of international law

David Armitage and Ignacio de la Rasilla

11. The view from the Leviathan: history of international law in the hegemon

John Fabian Witt

12. Using history in Latin America

Arnulf Becker Lorca

Index.

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BOOK: Hendrik SIMON, "A Century of Anarchy? War, Normativity, and the Birth of Modern International Order" (OUP, The History and Theory of International Law, 2024)

Source: OUP

The nineteenth century has been understood as an age in which states could wage war against each other if they deemed it politically necessary. According to this narrative, it was not until the establishment of the League of Nations, the Kellogg-Briand Pact, and the UN Charter that the 'free right to go to war' (liberum ius ad bellum) was gradually outlawed. Better times dawned as this anarchy of waging war ended, resulting in radical transformations of international law and politics.

However, as a 'free right to go to war' has never been empirically proven, this story of progress is puzzling. In A Century of Anarchy?: War, Normativity, and the Birth of Modern International Order, Hendrik Simon challenges this narrative by outlining a genealogy of modern war justifications and drawing on scientific, political, and public discourses. He argues that liberum ius ad bellum is an invention created by realist legal scholars in Imperial Germany who argued against the mainstream of European liberalism and, paradoxically, that the now forgotten Sonderweg reading was universalized in international historiographies after the World Wars.

A Century of Anarchy? is a compelling read for historians, jurists, political theorists, international relations scholars, and anyone interested in understanding the emergence of the modern international order. In this groundbreaking work, Simon not only artfully deconstructs the myth of liberum ius ad bellum but also traces the political and theoretical roots of the modern prohibition of war to the long nineteenth century (1789-1918).

Setting the Scene

1:Introduction: A Century of Anarchy, a Right to War?

2:Thesis and Antithesis: Why States Justify War

Part I. Justifying War in the Nineteenth Century: A European Discourse

3:On the Threshold of Modernity: From Revolutionizing to Reordering War

4:Birth of an International Order

5:Between Might and Right: Justified Wars and Multiple Normativities

6:The Promise of 'Peace through Law' in the Shadow of War

Part II. Emergence of a Myth: A German Sonderweg?

7:Recht zum Krieg: A Clausewitzian Tradition

8:A Hegemonic Discourse? On Mainstream(s) and Myth(s)

9:Antinomianism: The Kaiserreich's Politics of Justifying War

10:Old Order, New Order: Historiography between Anarchy and Progress

Conclusion

11:War, Normativity, and the Birth of Modern International Order

Hendrik Simon, Researcher, Peace Research Institute Frankfurt

Hendrik Simon is a postdoctoral researcher at the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt (PRIF) and Lecturer at Goethe University Frankfurt. He was Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Advanced International Theory/University of Sussex (2017), at the University of Vienna (2018, 2016), at the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History Frankfurt (2015-16) and at the Cluster of Excellence 'Normative Orders' (2011-12). Publications include The Justification of War and International Order. From Past to Present (OUP 2021; co-edited with Lothar Brock); and 'The Myth of Liberum Ius ad Bellum. Justifying War in 19th-Century International Legal Theory and Political Practice', 29 European Journal of International Law (2018).

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BOOK: Jean Paul PIERINI "Conflicts of Criminal Laws in the Subject Matter of Competence. The Early Resolutions of the Institut de Droit International" (Valore Italiano Editore, 2023)

 

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The exercise by States of criminal jurisdiction for conduct occurring outside their territory and conflicting claims are part of the daily legal landscape. Going through the early attempts by the Institut de Droit International to address conflicts of criminal law in the area of competence, starting from what the author calls the “Belle Époque” of international law, is an experience in and of itself. Conflicts of criminal laws are a somewhat exotic topic, reflecting an approach aimed at addressing the solution of conflicts of laws and preventing their most evident repercussion, jurisdictional conflicts, in the same shape as conflicts of laws under private international law, seeking the closest link existing between a certain situation and legislation and judicature. The approach reflected rather a “cultural attitude” to establish a level of cooperation with other States “below that of public international law”. Indeed, jurisdictional conflicts in criminal matters are impossible to keep at a level not encroaching on the sensibility of States, even if they do not involve the scrutiny of the exercise of public functions. The idealistic attempts to address conflicts of criminal laws are, in any case, inspiring and provide an insight into an age by no way less complex than the contemporary world, in which a small group of talented individuals believed to track the path of the development of international law. The themes addressed by the “men of 1873” and vehemently discussed are frequently still up for discussion. The book delves into the history and working procedures of the Institut, analysing resolutions, proposals, and, more generally, themes raised by its members. In such a fashion, the “Theses” proposed by Swiss professor Charles Brocher built on a broad idea of an “extended territoriality” entailing legal fictions. The later 1883 Munich Resolution provided a challenging construct by Ludwig von Bar and Emilio Brusa, outlining a comprehensive system built on strict territoriality and the physical presence of the author of the offence. The 1889 Montevideo Convention reversed the model and shows the influence of the debate at the Institut while building a system based on the sole effects of the offence. The 1879 Report by Louis Renault on the protection of submarine cables envisaged an advanced mechanism combining shared jurisdiction to enforce the prohibition to break and damage cables with the flag State’s exclusive jurisdiction to adjudicate. The pioneering initiatives of the Institut are motivating reading for those interested in the multifaceted aspects of jurisdictional issues.

Jean Paul Pierini serves as an officer on active duty in the Italian Navy holding the position of deputy head of the Office for Legal Affairs at the General Staff. He writes and co-writes legal monographies and articles, mostly on international criminal law, in his solely private capacity. For his writings, he received the following awards and recognition: the 2023 Special James Brown Scott Prize by the Institut de Droit International; the 2018 Premio Internazionale Giuridico-Scientifico “G. Falcone-P. Borsellino”; the 2016 Richard R. Baxter Military Prize by the Lieber Society on the Law of Armed Conflicts, Interest Group of the American Society of International Law.

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