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1 - Scope, Scale and Humility in the History of International Law

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 December 2024

By
Randall Lesaffer
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

By purpose and design The Cambridge History of International Law is situated at the forefront of the drive towards more global perspectives on the history of international law. This chapter accounts for the foundational choices and general architecture of the series. It does so by, first, surveying the broad outline of the evolution of the historiography of international law as an academic discipline since its first emergence in the latter half of the nineteenth century in terms of gradually overcoming the many self-imposed epistemological and mental constraints of the traditional state-centric and Eurocentric historiography. Second, the chapter assesses current methodological debates among historians of international law hailing from different disciplines – primarily law and history – within the broader contexts of general legal-history debates. The third section of the chapter indicates how the architecture of the series is purported to advance the agenda of the globalisation of the field, through a focus on the diverse histories of international law in various regions of the world.

Keywords

Historiographyinternational lawglobalisationmethodologylegal historyglobal history
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of International Law , pp. 1 - 46
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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References

Further Reading

Anghie, Antony, ‘The evolution of international law: colonial and postcolonial realities’, Third World Quarterly, 27 (2006) 739–53.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Becker Lorca, Arnulf, ‘Eurocentrism in the history of international law’ in Fassbender, Bardo and Peters, Anne (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the History of International Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2012) 1034–57.Google Scholar
Benton, Lauren, ‘Beyond anachronism: histories of international law and global legal politics’, Journal of the History of International Law, 21 (2019) 7–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Benton, Lauren, and Clulow, Adam, ‘Legal encounters and the origins of global law’ in Bentley, Jerry H., Subrahmanyam, Sanjay and Wiesner-Hanks, Merry E. (eds.), The Cambridge World History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2015) vol. 6.2, 80–100.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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De la Rasilla, Ignacio, International Law and History. Modern Interfaces (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2021).Google Scholar
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Fasolt, Constantin, The Limits of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2004).Google Scholar
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Gordon, Robert W., Taming the Past. Essays on Law in History and History in Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2017).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Koskenniemi, Martti, ‘Expanding histories of international law’, American Journal of Legal History, 56 (2016) 104–12.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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Koskenniemi, Martti, ‘A history of international law histories’ in Fassbender, Bardo and Peters, Anne (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the History of International Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2012) 943–71.Google Scholar
Lesaffer, Randall, ‘Law between past and present’ in Taekema, Sanne and van Klink, Bart (eds.), Law and Method (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2011) 133–552, at 133–7.Google Scholar
Lesaffer, Randall, ‘Roman law and the intellectual history of international law’ in Orford, Anne and Hoffmann, Florian (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the Theory of International Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2016) 38–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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Orford, Anne, International Law and the Politics of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2021).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Osterhammel, Jürgen, ‘World history’ in Schneider, Alex and Woolf, Daniel (eds.), The Oxford History of Historical Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2011) vol. 5, 93–112.Google Scholar
Pitts, Jennifer, Boundaries of the International. Law and Empire (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press 2018).Google Scholar
Woolf, Daniel, A Global History of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2011).Google Scholar

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