This chapter ponders the apparent neglect of the history of the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) by jurists and historians alike and ventures to offer some explanations. It also provides an overview of the Age of Institutionalization, from approximately the 1920s to the 1950s. This period witnessed the creation of arbitral institutions, such as the Court of Arbitration of the International Chamber of Commerce in 1923 and the American Arbitration Association in 1926. These institutions not only administered cases but also established rules and principles, such as the ICC Rules of Arbitration. Through such codification efforts, they also developed international commercial arbitration from within. The Age of Institutionalization was marked by a much more internationalist spirit or legal consciousness. It lasted until the 1950s, when the 1958 Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards (the New York Convention) ushered international commercial arbitration into a new era.

This chapter explains the background and objectives of the study. A general objective is to explore the history of international commercial arbitration and divide this history into three broad waves or periods: the Age of Aspirations, the Age of Institutionalization, and the Age of Autonomy. A more specific objective is to demonstrate that the history of international commercial arbitration has witnessed a kind of pendulum movement between broad periods of renewal and anxiety. Along the way, this book challenges key aspects of one of the most successful and enduring works about the modern evolution of international commercial arbitration, Dezalay and Garth’s Dealing in Virtue, by contesting these scholars’ argument that the opposition between “grand old men” and “young technocrats” was a key force in structuring the modern field of international commercial arbitration.