DIGITIZATION: Hundreds of Native American Treaties Digitized for the First Time (Indigenous Treaties Explorer)

 

(image source: Smithsonian mag)

First paragraph:

For many Native American tribes, historical treaties are a fraught reminder of promises made—and broken—by the United States government over centuries of colonial expansion and exploitation. The documents are also of paramount importance today, as tribes and activists point to them as binding agreements in legal battles for land and resources.

Thanks to a newly completed digitization effort by the U.S. National Archives and the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture (MIAC) in Santa Fe, researchers and the public now have unprecedented access to hundreds of these critical agreements.

Read further in Smithsonian Magazine.

Consult the database here. 

ZOOM SEMINAR: Legal Histories of Empire with Lisa Ford and Jessica Hinchy (Sydney, 5 MAR 2021)

(image source: Wikimedia Commons)

The following announcement circulated on the Legal History Blog and the ANZLHS blog:

Join us for the second of several symposia planned for 2020 and 2021 for Legal Histories of Empire.

Our speakers:

Lisa Ford: ‘The King’s Colonial Peace: Variable subjecthood and the transformation of empire’

This paper is drawn from my forthcoming book, The King’s Peace: Empire and Order in the British Empire. The book uses colonial peacekeeping as a lens through which to examine the shifting parameters of crown prerogative in Empire in the Age of Revolutions. This paper will argue that the legal vulnerability of (and often threats to order posed by) a diverse array of subjects – formerly French Catholics in Quebec, Caribbean slaves and NSW convicts – both prompted and justified the unravelling of the very idea of the freeborn Englishman that had been mobilised by protestant Britons in pre-revolutionary America.

Lisa Ford is Professor of History at the University of New South Wales, Australia. Her major publications include Settler Sovereignty: Jurisdiction and Indigenous People in America and Australia, 1788-1836 (2010) which won the Littleton-Griswold Prize (American Historical Association); the Thomas J. Wilson Prize (Harvard University Press); and the Premiers History Award (NSW). She is also co-author of Rage for Order: The British Empire and the Origins of International Law, 1800-1850 (co-authored with Lauren Benton, 2016) and author of The King’s Peace, which will be published by Harvard later this year. Ford is currently leading a collaborative project funded by the Australian Research Council exploring the role of commissions of inquiry sent throughout the British Empire in the 1820s on which subject she hopes to lead author a book manuscript this year. She also holds a four-year ARC Future Fellowship, during which she will explore the changing use of martial law in the British Empire from the late eighteenth century until 1865.

Jessica Hinchy: ‘Child Removal and the Colonial Governance of the Family: Hijra and “Criminal Tribe” Households in North India, c. 1865-1900’

Historians have primarily examined colonial child removal projects in settler colonial contexts. Yet from 1865, the colonial government in north India forcibly removed children from criminalised communities. Child separation began in the households of gender non-conforming people labelled ‘eunuchs,’ particularly Hijras, and eventually extended to socially marginalised people designated as ‘criminal tribes,’ especially Sansiyas. First, what does a comparison of these child removal schemes tell us about the colonial governance of the family? Patrilineal, conjugal and reproductive household models marginalised Hijras and Sansiyas in differing ways, while the category of ‘child’ was contingently defined. Child separation was attempted to varying ends, including both elimination and assimilation. Yet often, the colonial state could not sustain such intensified forms of intimate governance in the face of resistance from households. Nor could officials simply determine removed children’s futures. Second, what does child removal suggest about the making of colonial law? When children were initially removed from Hijra and Sansiya households, officials admitted that ‘the law may have been somewhat strained,’ since existing laws did not provide police or magistrates with legal powers to separate these children. The Sansiya child removal project, for instance, prompted debates about colonial legal exceptions and the ‘legality’ of the colonial state’s practices among colonial officials and Indian and European non-officials.

Jessica Hinchy is an Assistant Professor of History at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. She researches the history of gender, sexuality, households and family in colonial north India. In 2019, Cambridge University Press published her first monograph, Governing Gender and Sexuality in Colonial India: The Hijra, c. 1850-1900. Her research has also appeared in Modern Asian Studies, Gender & History and Asian Studies Review, among other journals.

The event will take place by zoom on Friday 5 March (or Thursday 4 March, depending on your timezone – see below). Please register here (via Eventbrite) to attend.

Timezones:

Sydney @ 12.30 pm on 5 March

Singapore @ 9.30 am on 5 March

Auckland @ 2.30 pm on 5 March

New Delhi @ 7.00 am on 5 March

London/Dublin @ 1.30 am on 5 March

Nairobi @ 4.30 am on 5 March

Vancouver @ 5.30 pm on 4 March

New Haven/Toronto @ 8.30 pm on 4 March

(source: Legal History Blog - ANZLHS) 

BOOK: Stefan EKLÖF AMIRELL, Pirates of Empire. Colonisation and Maritime Violence in Southeast Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). ISBN: 9781108594516, £ 75.00

  

(Source: CUP)

ABOUT THE BOOK

The suppression of piracy and other forms of maritime violence was a keystone in the colonisation of Southeast Asia. Focusing on what was seen in the nineteenth century as the three most pirate-infested areas in the region - the Sulu Sea, the Strait of Malacca and Indochina - this comparative study in colonial history explores how piracy was defined, contested and used to resist or justify colonial expansion, particularly during the most intense phase of imperial expansion in Southeast Asia from c.1850 to c.1920. In doing so, it demonstrates that piratical activity continued to occur in many parts of Southeast Asia well beyond the mid-nineteenth century, when most existing studies of piracy in the region end their period of investigation. It also points to the changes over time in how piracy was conceptualised and dealt with by each of the major colonial powers in the region - Britain, France, the Netherlands, Spain and the United States. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Stefan Eklöf Amirell is Associate Professor in History at Linnaeus University, Sweden. He is also the President of the Swedish Historical Association and Sweden's delegate to the International Committee of Historical Sciences (ICHS/CISH). Among his previous works are Pirates in Paradise: A Modern History of Southeast Asia's Maritime Marauders (2006) and several articles on piracy in Southeast Asia.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Maps page vi

Preface vii

Acknowledgements ix

Introduction 1

1 Piracy in Global and Southeast Asian History 21

2 The Sulu Sea 42

3 The Strait of Malacca 96

4 Indochina 161

Conclusion 209

Epilogue: Piracy and the End of Empire 232

Bibliography 236

Index 257

More information with the publisher.

(source: ESCLH Blog)

ONLINE LECTURE SERIES: Mark GOLDIE, John Locke and Empire (Oxford: The Carlyle Lectures in Hilary Term 2021)

(image source: University of Oxford)

On the speaker:

Mark Goldie, Professor Emeritus of Intellectual History, University of Cambridge; Honorary Professor, University of Sussex

Watch the full series here.

 

ARTICLE: Daragh GRANT, "Francisco de Vitoria and Alberico Gentili on the Juridical Status of Native American Polities" (Renaissance Quarterly LXXII (2020), Nr. 3, 910-952)

 

(image source: CUP)

Abstract:

Over the course of the sixteenth century, Europeans writing about the ius gentium went from treating indigenous American rulers as the juridical equals of Europe's princes to depicting them as little more than savage brutes, incapable of bearing dominium and ineligible for the protections of the law of peoples. This essay examines the writings of Francisco de Vitoria and Alberico Gentili to show how this transformation in European perceptions of Native Americans resulted from fundamental changes in European society. The emergence of a novel conception of sovereignty amid the upheavals of the Protestant Reformation was central to this shift and provided a new foundation for Europe's continued imperial expansion into the Americas.

Read more with CUP, DOI 10.1017/rqx.2019.255.

BOOK: Inge VAN HULLE, Britain and International Law in West Africa The Practice of Empire [The History and Theory of International Law] (Oxford: OUP, 22 OCT 2020), 320 p. ISBN 9780198869863, 80 GBP

 

(image source: OUP)

Abstract:

Africa often remains neglected in studies that discuss the historical relationship between international law and imperialism during the nineteenth century. When it does feature, focus tends to be on the Scramble for Africa, and the treaties concluded between European powers and African polities in which sovereignty and territory were ceded. Drawing on a wide range of archival material, Inge Van Hulle brings a fresh new perspective to this traditional narrative. She reviews the use and creation of legal instruments that expanded or delineated the boundaries between British jurisdiction and African communities in West Africa, and uncovers the practicality and flexibility with which international legal discourse was employed in imperial contexts. This legal experimentation went beyond treaties of cession, and also encompassed commercial treaties, the abolition of the slave trade, extraterritoriality, and the use of force. The book argues that, by the 1880s, the legal techniques that were fashioned in the language of international law in West Africa had largely developed their own substantive characteristics. Legal ordering was not done in reference to adjudication before Western courts or the writings of Western lawyers, but in reference to what was deemed politically expedient and practically feasible by imperial agents for the preservation of social peace, commercial interaction, and humanitarian agendas.

On the author:

Inge Van Hulle is Assistant Professor of Legal History at Tilburg University, The Netherlands. Prior to joining Tilburg University she worked as a PhD research assistant at the department of Roman law and legal history at KU Leuven where she obtained here PhD in 2016. At Tilburg University she teaches courses such as 'History and Theory of International Law', 'History of International Law', 'History of Government and Public Institutions' and 'Early Modern History'.

(source: OUP)

ADVANCE ARTICLE: Vanessa OGLE, ‘Funk Money’: The End of Empires, The Expansion of Tax Havens, and Decolonization as an Economic and Financial Event', Past & Present, 2020 (OPEN ACCESS)

 

(image: Geneva; source: Wikimedia Commons)

Abstract:

This article traces the emergence of an archipelago-like landscape of distinct legal and economic spaces throughout the long midcentury. Consisting of tax havens, offshore financial markets, flags of convenience, and economic free zones, this archipelago allowed free-market capitalism to flourish on the sidelines of a world increasingly dominated by more sizable and interventionist nation-states. It argues that certain characteristics of the rise of free-market capitalism since the 1970s and 1980s were previously practiced in the offshore archipelago, only to move back to Europe and North America with the rise of neoliberalism.

Read more with OUP (DOI 10.1093/pastj/gtaa001). 

BOOK: Patrice GUENIFFEY & Thierry LENTZ (eds.), La Fin des Empires [Tempus] Historiques] (Paris: Perrin, 2017), 480 p. ISBN 9782262069681, € 10

(image source: Lisez)

Summary:

L’histoire est-elle condamnée à se répéter ? Cette question fameuse mérite particulièrement d’être posée concernant la naissance et la chute des Empires. Depuis l’Antiquité, certaines contrées, par le fer, l’or et l’esprit, se hissent au rang de puissance prépondérante et dominent une large partie du monde. Pourtant, selon l’adage fameux de Jean-Baptiste Duroselle, « tout empire périra » pour des raisons diverses même si un noyau dur d’explications peut être appliquée dans presque tous les cas : crises de croissance notamment en matière d’intégration, paupérisation économique, épuisement du modèle militaire et naturellement apparition et renforcement de rivaux. Pour la première fois, des historiens de renoms, spécialistes dans leurs domaines respectifs, racontent et analysent avec brio le déclin et la chute des grands « Empires qui ont fait le monde », de Rome à Washington en passant par la Chine, l’Empire des Steppes, Byzance, l’Espagne, le grand Empire de Napoléon, l’Autriche-Hongrie, la Russie, le IIIème Reich… et bien d’autres.

On the editors:

Directeur de la Fondation Napoléon, Thierry Lentz s’est affirmé comme le meilleur connaisseur actuel de l’époque impériale, comme en témoigne sa Nouvelle histoire du Premier Empire en quatre volumes (2002-2010). Il a récemment publié chez Perrin Le Congrès de Vienne. Une refondation de l’Europe 1814-1815 et Les vingt jours de Fontainebleau. La première abdication de Napoléon 31 mars-20 avril 1814, Waterloo et une biographie de Joseph Bonaparte. Professeur à l’EHESS, Patrice Gueniffey a notamment publié Le nombre et la raison (1993), La politique de la Terreur, Essai sur la violence révolutionnaire (2000). Le 18 Brumaire, L’épilogue de la Révolution française (2008) et son Bonaparte (2013) ont été universellement salués par la critique. Il a depuis dirigé les meilleurs historiens dans l’ouvrage collectif à succès Les derniers jours des rois chez Perrin et Le Figaro (2014) et vient de publier son très attendu « Napoléon et De Gaulle. Deux héros français ». 

(source: Perrin)

ADVANCE ARTICLE: Richard BOURKE, 'European Empire and International Law from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century" (The Historical Journal) (OPEN ACCESS)

(image source: CUP)

Abstract:

In the 1821 Preface to his Elements of the philosophy of right, Hegel famously claimed that ‘philosophy…is its own time comprehended in thoughts’. It is tempting to view history in equivalent terms. After all, historical research usually engages the past under the influence of contemporary concerns. Topics acquire pertinence on account of prevailing values and interests. And yet there is a clear difference between being roused to investigate a subject as a result of its ongoing resonance and interpreting its meaning in terms of current attitudes. This distinction, however, is often blurred, and with it appropriate relations between historical analysis and moral judgement. It may well be that, at the level of political philosophy, each of these activities can be reconciled; but first their respective provinces should be carefully delimited.

Read the article for free here.

ARTICLE: William MULLIGAN, " Decisions for Empire: Revisiting the 1882 Occupation of Egypt" (English Historical Review CXXXV (2020), nr. 572 (Feb), 94-126)

(image source: Oxford Journals)

Abstract:

The decision of Gladstone’s government to invade and occupy Egypt in 1882 remains one of the most contentious in late nineteenth-century British political and imperial history. This article examines the decision-making process in June and July 1882, revisiting Robinson and Gallagher’s influential study in the light of more recent historiographical research and previously unused sources. It looks at who made the critical decisions, what their preoccupations were, and how they were able to get Cabinet approval. Hartington and Northbrook were the two key figures, who co-operated to overturn Gladstone’s and Granville’s policy in June 1882. Yet their co-operation was momentary and they found themselves on different sides of the argument over the participation of Indian forces and international support. Although they shared a sense of Egypt’s importance to British imperial security, they each had a distinctive approach, so that the decision to occupy cannot be reduced to a conflict between Whig pragmatists and Radical idealists. The article also shows how the Alexandria riot on 11 June altered the context of decision-making by shifting the mood in the parliamentary Liberal party towards intervention. Parliament, not the press, was the crucial site of ‘public opinion’ in the Egyptian crisis in June and July 1882.

Read more with Oxford Journals.

BOOK: Edward CAVANAGH (ed.), Empire and Legal Thought Ideas and Institutions from Antiquity to Modernity, (Leiden/Boston: Brill/Nijhoff, 2020). ISBN: 9789004430983, € 170.00

(Source: Brill)

ABOUT THE BOOK

Series: Legal History Library, Studies in the History of International Law, Volume: 41/16

Emphatic of the importance of legal thought to the rise and fall of empires, this book highlights the centrality of empires to the development of legal thought. 

Comprehension of the development of legal thought over time is necessary for any historical, philosophical, practical, or theoretical enquiry into the subject today, it is argued here. When seen against the background of broad geopolitical, diplomatic, administrative, intellectual, religious, and commercial changes, law begins to appear very resilient. It withstands the rise and fall of empires. It provides the framework for the establishment of new orders in the place of the old. Today what analogies, principles, and authorities of law have survived these changes continue to inform much of the international legal tradition. 

Contributors are: Clifford Ando, Lia Brazil, Joseph Canning, Edward Cavanagh, Zachary Chitwood, Emanuele Conte, Matt Crow, Alberto Esu, Tiziana Faitini, Dante Fedele, Naveen Kanalu, Alexandre A. Loktionov, P. G. McHugh, Jordan Rudinsky, Mark Somos, Joshua Smeltzer, Lorenzo Veracini, Halcyon Weber, and Sarah Winter.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Edward Cavanagh was a Fellow (2016-2019) of Downing College, after attaining his PhD from the University of Ottawa (2012-2015). His scholarly interests lie at the crossroads of law and history.

img src="https://brill.com/cover/covers/9789004431249.jpg?width=300"/>

More information here

(source: ESCLH Blog)

BOOK: Thomas G. OTTE (ed.), British World Policy and the Projection of Global Power, c.1830–1960 (Cambridge: CUP, 2019), ISBN 9781107198852, 75 GBP

(image source: CUP)

Book abstract:

A fundamental truth about British power in the nineteenth century and beyond was that Britain was a global power. Her international position rested on her global economic, naval and political presence, and her foreign policy operated on a global scale. This volume throws into sharp relief the material elements of British power, but also its less tangible components, from Britain's global network of naval bases to the vast range of intersecting commercial, financial and intelligence relationships, which reinforced the country's political power. Leading historians reshape the scholarly debate surrounding the nature of British global power at a crucial period of transformation in international politics, and in so doing they deepen our understanding of the global nature of British power, the shifts in the international landscape from the high Victorian period to the 1960s, and the changing nature of the British state in this period.

On the editor:

T. G. Otte is Professor of Diplomatic History at the University of East Anglia. Among his latest books are July Crisis: The World's Descent into War, Summer 1914 (2014), The Age of Anniversaries: The Cult of Commemoration, 1895–1925 (ed., 2018) and Statesman of Europe: A Life of Sir Edward Grey (forthcoming). 

(source: CUP)

ADVANCE ARTICLE: Zak LEONARD, "Law of Nations Theory and the Native Sovereignty Debates in Colonial India" (Law & History Review)

(image source: Cambridge Core)

First paragraph:

Perhaps few topics are more invidious in colonial legal history than the definition of “paramountcy” in British India. Alternatively cast as a feudal compact with subordinate native princely states, a noninterventionist policy supportive of semi-sovereignty, and a doctrine invented to justify colonial “earth hunger,”1 the concept elicited significant debate in the mid-Victorian era. But epistemological and practical issues bedeviled any comprehensive understanding of the term.

Read more on Cambridge Core.

CALL FOR PAPERS: "The Past is Prologue: The Impact of Law’s History" (DEADLINE 30 SEP 2019)

The Past is Prologue: The Impact of Law’s History : A New Edited Collection of Essays on Legal History 

The Book. 

Legal rules, decisions, institutions, and individual actors have had an enormous impact on our cultures and societies today. The leaders that govern us, the crimes that are committed, and the freedoms that we cherish are part and parcel of the enduring legacy of legal history. Despite its diminishing presence in legal education in recent decades, the study of legal history is on an upswing as its importance gains renewed recognition. The availability of new techniques and resources allow scholars to develop new insights and supplement, contextualise, or challenge our previous understandings of the causes and consequences of developments in law and society. 
We are assembling a special collection of essays that consider how legal history in Aboriginal, British, Australian, American or wider contexts have shaped our shared present. The essays in this collection will be more than just discussions of particular aspects of legal history in the abstract; instead, each will draw a clear and significant connection to a meaningful feature of our lives today. With this Call for Papers, we are now soliciting contributions from the academy and members of the public more generally. 

Advice for contributors.  

This edited collection will be initially offered to an Australian academic press.  Please submit an abstract of up to 250 words explaining the focus and approach your proposed essay would take to ensure appropriate academic rigour. The proposed volume is intended to be scholarly but accessible in tone and approach. Each contribution should be in the area of 6000 to 10000 words. Please email abstracts to marcus.harmes@usq.edu.au by 30 September 2019. 

About the editors. 

Associate Professor Marcus Harmes is Associate Director (Academic Development) in the University of Southern Queensland’s Open Access College and teaches legal history in the law degree.  Dr. Jeremy Patrick is Acting Associate Head of School (Research) in the University of Southern Queensland School of Law and Justice. He has published on the historical aspects of various subjects in the area of law and religion.  Ms Sarah McKibbin is Lecturer (Law) in the University of Southern Queensland’s School of Law and Justice. She was instrumental in developing the legal history course in the law degree.

(source: Legal History Blog)

REVIEW: Alberto RINALDI reviews Martti KOSKENNIEMI, Walter RECH & Manuel JIMÉNEZ FONSECA (eds.), International Law and Empire: Historical Explorations (Oxford: OUP, 2017) (American Journal of Legal History Advance Articles)

(image source: Blogger)

First paragraph:

In recent years there has been a real flourishing of historical studies with a focus on international law’s past. The so called ‘turn to history’ is precisely the kind of terrain in which the present volume - in the form of a collection of essays - is situated, as the book explores the various, ambivalent ways in which international law has dealt with and is related to ‘Empire’, understood as a set of manifold practices, discourses, social manifestations, struggles, spaces and people.The authors - coming from a wide range of backgrounds from postcolonial studies to political philosophy - are in fact interested in looking at those episodes, events, theories, and texts...

Read more with Oxford Journals.
See earlier for on this blog for the book description.

BOOK REVIEW: Thomas GIDNEY reviews Kim A. WAGNER, Amritsar 1919, An Empire of Fear and the Making of a Massacre (New Haven: Yale UP, 2019) (LSE Review of Books)

(image source: LSE Review of Books)

Review summary:

13 April 2019 marks 100 years since the Amritsar (or Jallianwala Bagh) massacre, which remains one of the most controversial acts of colonial violence in the history of the British Empire. In his new book Amritsar 1919: An Empire or Fear and the Making of a Massacre, Kim A. Wagner offers a meticulously researched account of the events leading up to the massacre as well as its aftermath. The book vividly and emotively captures post-war Amritsar, the horrors of the massacre and the violent humiliation inflicted through British colonial retribution, writes Thomas Gidney.

Read more with the LSE Review of Books.

BOOK: Jeremy BLACK, Imperial Legacies. The British Empire Around the World (New York: Encounter Books, 2019), 216 p. ISBN 9781641770385, 20 USD

(image source: Encounter Books)

Book abstract:

The reality of being top dog is that everybody hates you. In this provocative book, noted historian and commentator Jeremy Black shows how criticisms of the legacy of the British Empire are, in part, criticisms of the reality of American power today. He emphasizes the prominence of imperial rule in history and in the world today, and the selective way in which certain countries are castigated. Imperial Legacies is a wide-ranging and vigorous assault on political correctness, its language, misuse of the past, and grasping of both present and future.

On the author:

JEREMY BLACK is Established Professor of History at the University of Exeter. Graduating from Cambridge with a starred first, he did postgraduate work at Oxford and then taught at Durham, eventually as professor, before moving to Exeter in 1996. He has lectured extensively in Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, New Zealand, and the United States, where he has held visiting chairs at West Point, Texas Christian University, and Stillman College. He was appointed to the Order of Membership of the British Empire for services to stamp design. He is, or has been, on a number of editorial boards, including the Journal of Military History, the Journal of the Royal United Services Institute, and History Today, and was editor of Archives. His books include The British Seaborne Empire, Contesting History, and Rethinking World War Two. 

More information with the publisher.

PODCAST: La Grande-Bretagne, l'Europe et les autres: Le choix du monde ? (France Culture/La Fabrique de l'Histoire, 27 MAR 2019)

France Culture's La Fabrique de l'Histoire made a broadcast on the British Empire, British internal politics and "Global Britain". With Pierre Singaravélou (Paris I), Guillemette Crouzet (Warwick) and Clarisse Berthezène.

Introduction:

En quelques siècles le Royaume-Uni s'est imposé comme une puissance coloniale, adoptant tour à tour le rôle de policier du monde faisant régner la Pax Britannica et la posture du "splendide isolement", en observateur détaché des guerres intestines européennes. Le Royaume-Uni ne s'est pourtant jamais construit sans l'Europe ou en dehors de l'Europe, loin s'en faut. Le Brexit n'est que la dernière occurrence d'une longue histoire de relations complexes et fluctuantes, une histoire elle-même sujette à de nombreuses polémiques et à autant de décentrages que l'Empire britannique compta de territoires.

More information with France Culture.

CALL FOR PAPERS: Montesquieu hors d’Europe. Traductions et usages de L’Esprit des lois (Bordeaux: Université Bordeaux-Montaigne, Spring 2020); DEADLINE 1 JUL 2019

(image source: europeanmemories.net)

Conference summary:

De l’Esprit des lois est un monument qui déroute à double titre ; tout d’abord par son ampleur (plus de mille pages pour quatorze ans de travail), ensuite par sa difficulté de lecture. L’œuvre maitresse de Montesquieu a suscité une grande diversité d’interprétations : salué comme le moment fondateur de la science politique, certains voient en lui l’expression du républicanisme moderne alors que d’autres préfèrent le ranger dans le crédo libéral. La multiplicité des thèmes abordés, dans un désordre apparent, ne manque pas de troubler : dans sa recherche des causes physiques et morales des institutions, Montesquieu propose tour à tour une théorie sur la loi, sur les types de gouvernements ; une réflexion sur la liberté politique ainsi qu’une théorie des climats et de « l'esprit général ». Cet ouvrage fut aussi celui par lequel Montesquieu donna matière au concept de despotisme qu’il inventa, rassemblant sous l’adjectif « oriental » associé à ce régime politique, entre autres, les empires Ottoman et Perse, la Chine et le Japon. Comment ce monument des Lumières a-t-il été lu hors d’Europe, notamment dans les pays que Montesquieu rangea dans la catégorie du despotisme ? Quels défis représentèrent la traduction de l’œuvre et la compréhension des thèmes abordés ? Quel en fut l’usage dans un contexte d’introduction de la philosophie politique européenne ? Ces questions qui s’imposent très tôt dans le Japon moderne (où L’Esprit des lois est traduit dès 1875), concernent certainement aussi une bonne partie des pays d’Asie ou d’ailleurs. Du moins tels sont les thèmes que nous invitons tous les spécialistes de langues non-européennes à discuter. La réflexion devra s’orienter vers l’analyse de la traduction de tout ou partie des thèmes constitutifs de l’ouvrage, avec le souci de s’inscrire dans la perspective du transfert culturel et de l’histoire intellectuelle.

Proposals can be sent to eddy.dufourmont@u-bordeaux-montaigne.fr by 1 July 2019.

(source: ESCLH Blog)

BOOK: Duncan BELL (ed.), Empire, Race and Global Justice, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). ISBN 9781108427791, £ 75.00

(Source: CUP)

Cambridge University Press is publishing a new book on the role of race and empire in debates over global justice.

ABOUT THE BOOK

The status of boundaries and borders, questions of global poverty and inequality, criteria for the legitimate uses of force, the value of international law, human rights, nationality, sovereignty, migration, territory, and citizenship: debates over these critical issues are central to contemporary understandings of world politics. Bringing together an interdisciplinary range of contributors, including historians, political theorists, lawyers, and international relations scholars, this is the first volume of its kind to explore the racial and imperial dimensions of normative debates over global justice.

ABOUT THE EDITOR

Duncan Bell, University of Cambridge
Duncan Bell is a Reader in Political Thought and International Relations at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction: empire, race, and global justice Duncan Bell
1. Reparations, history, and the origins of global justice Katrina Forrester
2. The doctor's plot: the origins of the philosophy of human rights Samuel Moyn
3. Corporations, universalism and the domestication of race in international law Sundhya Pahuja
4. Race and global justice Charles W. Mills
5. Association, reciprocity and emancipation: a transnational account of the politics of global justice Inés Valdez
6. Global justice: just another modernisation theory? Anne Phillips
7. Globalizing global justice Margaret Kohn
8. Challenging liberal belief: Edward said and the critical practice of history Jeanne Morefield
9. Cosmopolitan just war and coloniality Kimberley Hutchings
10. Indigenous peoples, settler colonialism, and global justice in Anglo-America Robert Nichols
11. Decolonizing borders, self-determination, and global justice Catherine Lu.

More information here
(source: ESCLH Blog)