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10 - ‘The Most Neglected Province’

British Historiography of International Law

from Part II - The Historiography of International Law

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 December 2024

By
David Armitage  and
Ignacio de la Rasilla
Edited by
Randall Lesaffer  and
Anne Peters
Randall Lesaffer
Affiliation:
KU Leuven & Tilburg University
Anne Peters
Affiliation:
Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law, Heidelberg
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Summary

This chapter periodises the British historiography of international law in five parts. Its first period extends from Robert Ward’s Enquiry into the Foundation and History of the Law of Nations in Europe (1795) to Thomas Erskine Holland’s Oxford inaugural lecture on Alberico Gentili (1874), and traces the gradual professionalisation of the discipline and its historical strain. The second part examines the entanglement of empire and historicism in British international legal historiography from around 1870 to roughly 1920. The third part treats the symbolic coming of age of British international legal historiography, between the founding of the British Yearbook of International Law in 1920, and Hersch Lauterpacht’s pivotal enunciation of the so-called ‘Grotian’ tradition of international law after the Second World War. The fourth part explores the history of international law in the succeeding ‘age of Lauterpacht’ up to c. 1960, when historiographical advances came increasingly from the semi-periphery rather than the centre and from disciplines other than international law. The fifth part takes stock of the transdisciplinary ‘turn’ to the history of international law in the British world and the chapter concludes with reflections on the nascent field of comparative international legal history in the light of British developments over the longue durée.

Keywords

Historiographyinternational lawhistoricismBritish EmpireprofessionalisationGrotian traditionCold War
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of International Law , pp. 293 - 329
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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References

Further Reading

Barrett, Jill, and Gauci, Jean-Pierre (eds.), British Contributions to International Law, 1915–2015. An Anthology Set, 4 vols. (Leiden and Boston: Brill/Nijhoff 2020).Google Scholar
Craven, Matthew, ‘The invention of a tradition: Westlake, the Berlin Conference and the historicisation of international law’ in Vec, Miloš and Nuzzo, Luigi (eds.), Constructing International Law. The Birth of a Discipline (Frankfurt: Klosterman 2012) 363–403.Google Scholar
Crawford, James, ‘Public international law in twentieth-century England’ in Beatson, Jack and Zimmermann, Reinhard (eds.), Jurists Uprooted. German-Speaking Émigré Lawyers in Twentieth-Century Britain (Oxford: Clarendon Press 2004) 681–707.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fitzmaurice, Andrew, ‘The resilience of natural law in the writings of Sir Travers Twiss’ in Hall, Ian and Hill, Lisa (eds.), British International Thinkers from Hobbes to Namier (Basingstoke: Palgrave 2009) 137–59.Google Scholar
Johnson, D.H.N., ‘The English tradition in international law’, International and Comparative Law Quarterly, 11 (1962) 416–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Koskenniemi, Martti, ‘Lauterpacht: the Victorian tradition in international law’, European Journal of International Law, 8 (1997) 215–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Landauer, Carl, ‘From status to treaty: Henry Sumner Maine’s international law’, Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence, 15 (2002) 219–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lobban, Michael, ‘English approaches to international law in the nineteenth century’ in Craven, Matthew, Fitzmaurice, Malgosia and Vogiatzi, Maria (eds.), Time, History and International Law (Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff 2007) 65–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McCorquodale, Robert, and Gauci, Jean-Pierre (eds.), British Influences on International Law, 1915–2015 (Leiden and Boston: Brill 2016).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mantena, Karuna, Alibis of Empire. Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2010).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pitts, Jennifer, Boundaries of the International. Law and Empire (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press 2018).Google Scholar
Pitts, Jennifer, ‘International law’ in Bevir, Mark (ed.), Historicism and the Human Sciences in Victorian Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2017) 237–61.Google Scholar
Sands, Philippe, East West Street. On the Origins of ‘Genocide’ and ‘Crimes against Humanity’ (New York: Alfred A. Knopf 2016).Google Scholar
Sylvest, Casper, ‘International law in nineteenth-century Britain’, British Yearbook of International Law, 75 (2004) 9–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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