Histories of international law more or less follow the epistemic position of the jurisdiction in which they arise. The parochial anglophone student of the comparative literature in the history of international law instantly sees a version of this phenomenon in action. With notable exceptions, even sophisticated work in the history of international law in the US is importantly different from English-language work in the same field that has begun to pour out from scholars based in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and elsewhere. In this chapter, I propose that this is because US scholars since at least the Second World War have taken up the history of international law through a set of questions and presuppositions structured by a standpoint inside the leviathan. The most powerful player on the international stage – the United States – has exerted a gravitational pull on scholars writing the history of international law and on the functions that such histories serve.  In recent years, however, the cross-border professionalisation of the field is helping produce histories increasingly further afield from, or at least in a newly complex relationship with, the epistemic domination of the hegemon.

The introduction outlines the arrangement of the book, explains the comparative method and the selection of the case studies, and comments on the primary sources.

The art and craft of writing history are inherently linked with international-law scholarship. Finding precedents and doctrinal authority and reading the political compromises underpinning institutions are typical purposes. Lawyers, academics and political actors have all been receptive to a historical narrative. The structure and arguments used in international law are closely linked with Western legal culture and the reception of Roman law. This setting is at the same time broader and more restrictive than that of professional academic historians, who developed theoretical standards to distinguish their thought-through production (historia rerum gestarum) from the rendering of brute facts (res gestae) or from a purely literary product. This chapter starts with German and French eighteenth-century visions of the law of nations, before passing to the nineteenth-century passion for history. The ‘men’ of 1873 (Institute of International Law) and twentieth-century evolutions led to the recent boom in scholarship. The ‘turn to history’ in international law not only continues past traditions, but also reflects broader transformations in the social sciences and humanities. Conversely, we witness a contemporary ‘turn to law’ in intellectual, political, cultural and social history, which leads to a stimulating process of cross-fertilisation.

The cobreros entered the Age of Revolutions in 1780 in a calamitous position but emerged in 1800 in a stronger one with an edict recognizing their freedom and their pueblo. Although they retained their formal civil freedom, the limited political freedoms they obtained were eroded during the first decades of the nineteenth century given wider colonial and global changes. Yet the cobreros continued using the courts invoking the Freedom Edict of 1800, but how the local identity of natives of El Cobre continued to be mobilized or how it changed in subsequent generations with the arrival of other settlers and the globalization of El Cobre remains uncertain. After summarizing the main findings and arguments of the study, the book concludes with a reflection on the significance of the category of local nativeness for racial colonial subjects and the political uses and rights claimed for this category in changing historical contexts in the past and its reemergence in various Latin American nations in the twenty-first century.

In their biographical compendia, as mentioned earlier, Ranj and Nadir divide women poets into two broad categories: ‘public women’ and ‘secluded women’. Seclusion was an important marker of difference but, within the literary space, they were both represented as contributing to the enrichment and diversification of art, aesthetics, and language. The bāzārī ‘aurat, or ‘the woman of the market’, was defined by the absence of a household, and, of course, the word bāzār reflected her association with money – as someone who evoked the sensoria in exchange for an economic transaction. Definitions are elusive and reductionist; our tazkiras reveal these women as invested with a wide range of skills and linguistic abilities, leading an enriching life, and actively participating in the shaping of the social and cultural landscape. There was, as we have seen, a wide range of women who fell under this category, and there were considerable differences among them in terms of resources and patronage, caste and sub-caste affiliations, social location, profession, and place and type of performance. Furthermore, the boundaries that separated them from ‘chaste women’ were quite porous, and crossovers were not unknown.

Hindustani Poetry and Music in British Homes: English-speaking Women Composing Poems in Urdu

Described as pardah nashīn, or ‘women who live in seclusion’, these ‘chaste women’ were also marked by considerable diversity. There were some among them who belonged to the royal harem, but the harem was itself a diverse space; there were poets therein who had matrimonial relations with the rulers, and those who were their blood relations, and yet some others who served as concubines and slaves, but were still literate enough to compose poems. Our tazkiras refer to women poets who came from the homes of nobles, aristocrats, and, more interestingly, merchant houses as well. We also come across women poets who came from the home of an English official; the daughter of an English gentleman, Jami‘at was a ‘Hindustani’ from her maternal side. Described by both Ranj and Nadir as a ‘Christian woman’ (‘īsayī ‘aurat), she was married to a high-ranking British army officer, Major R. Justin. ‘Her lyrics were’, says Nadir, ‘on the lips of professional singers (gawa’iyōn) in the city of Agra’. She was also quite adept in the ‘knowledge of music’ (‘ilm-i musaqī). She knew English well and composed poems in Braj, Persian, and Urdu.

This chapter examines how the Chinese and Vietnamese communists’ perceptions of the border, and their priorities and ability to project state power there, changed as they transformed from revolutionary insurrectionists to ruling elites during 1949–1954. As more areas under DRV’s control connected with Chinese territory, the Chinese and Vietnamese communists started to jointly enforce the international boundary, enhance the cohesion of state authorities over the margins of their power, and extract revenues by controlling cross-border flows of goods and people during the First Indochina War. State building by the Chinese and Vietnamese Communists at the border, however, remained asymmetric during this period. Due to the two parties’ different status in their respective countries, the contested social spaces of borderlands posed greater dangers to the Chinese revolutionary state during its political consolidation while offering greater opportunities to the wartime DRV state to obtain material for its struggle against the French colonial troops. During the First Indochina War, the Sino-Vietnamese border was a site of selective coercion. Both the PRC and the DRV steadily expanded their economic functions by extracting taxes and thrusting state-owned trade companies into the existing cross-border commercial networks.

Central America was a “hot spot” in the Cold War, constituting a strategic zone for US campaigns against communism from the 1960s to the 1980s. During the same period, the region was also a “hot spot” due to the critical nutritional situation of its poorest populations. Informed by the idea of a “protein gap,” international organizations and scientific institutions carried out field investigations and nutritional surveys to identify dietary deficiencies, their causes, and possible solutions. This chapter explores the role that bean varietal improvement played in this situation of war and nutritional crisis, and the political and social conditions under which bean research took shape. It describes the research programs that the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) promoted in Latin America through the 1980s and Central American countries’ participation in these. It reviews the bean program established by CIAT in Latin America and Africa and a regional program created specifically for Central America and the Caribbean. It then interprets the evolution of these programs in the context of civil war and economic crisis in Central America between 1970 and 1990.

The epilogue brings the narrative from the early years of the new century to recent events, just before sending the manuscript to print, in mid 2024. It tells of the changing attitudes in Germany both towards Jews living in that country and towards Israel and its policies of occupation in the Palestinian West Bank. The unique German–Israeli relationship during the last two decades is sketched against the background of the past, and finally, it is attempted to draw a balance between the apparent achievement of a decent Jewish life in Germany, on the one hand, and the new dangers of a rising politically organized right, simultaneously with a growing critique of Israel and the apparent emergence of a new antisemitism, on the other hand.