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.

This chapter provides an overview of each of the book’s chapters and summarizes a key objective of the book, which was to identify three broad phases or periods in the modern history of international commercial arbitration: the Age of Aspirations, the Age of Institutionalization, and the Age of Autonomy. It also asks whether we are entering a new age in the modern history of international commercial arbitration – an Age of Disruption, where the tension between the mercatocracy and the State is exacerbated by unfamiliar circumstances that could threaten the integrity of the arbitration system as a whole. These circumstances include such phenomena as the rise of nationalism, the reemergence of protectionism, and broader fears about globalization. It points to what Judge Crawford described as a “risk of erosion in the current political climate,” and asks whether this “erosion” could signal a shift from the Age of Autonomy to the Age of Disruption.