Expanding Histories of International Law

Much of the recent surge of interest in the history of international law has been fed by postcolonial attitudes in the legal academy. In the footsteps of Antony Anghie’s Sovereignty, Imperialism and International Law,1 new works have examined international law’s role in facilitating or reforming the structures of Western rule in the colonies or in the global south before and after formal colonialism. Some of these have focused on the 19th century uses of legal techniques such as extraterritoriality or arbitration to guarantee the predominance of Western—European or American—interests in the Middle East, in Africa, or Latin America.2 Early 20th century international institutions—the League of Nations, commodity agreements, aspects of multilateral treaty-making—have been examined with the view to understanding their role in the perpetuation of the global preponderance of the West. Other studies have focused on the struggles of the third world in the decolonization period—the formation and work of the ‘G-77’ in the aftermath of the Bandung Conference (1955) and the rise and fall of the ‘New International Economic Order’ in the 1970s and 1980s.3 The history of human rights, a real cottage industry nowadays, has likewise attracted postcolonial examinations of the role of subjective rights in the consolidation of Western economic or ideological hegemony.4