After Kristallnacht, the Nazis introduced forced labor for German Jews. Later, over a million Jewish men and women toiled for private and public enterprises in Europe and North Africa. Changing economic needs and persecution goals during the war determined timing, purpose, inhumane labor conditions, and chances of survival in each territory.

Few events, if any, in the modern era have been more disturbing than the Holocaust. This four-volume Cambridge History, with over 100 contributions from leading scholars in the field, represents the most wide-ranging effort in decades to grapple with the catastrophe. The present moment seems an ideal time to offer such an extensive review. Since the end of the Cold War there has been an explosion of scholarship on every aspect of the Holocaust, from origins and participation to memory and memorialization, from top-level decision-making to everyday responses and experiences across all the regions involved. As part of this wave of new work there has been an integration into English-language scholarship of historiographies too long segregated into separate enclaves, not least the extraordinarily rich Yiddish-language and other Jewish research of the early postwar period (in whose recovery several authors in this collection have played a pivotal role). All this cries out for a synthesis. The Cambridge History of the Holocaust has set itself the task of offering both an authoritative review of what has been achieved and new interpretations based on original research.

A hybrid legal discipline dealing with the relationships between the right to punish and state sovereignty, international criminal law (ICL) overturns classical conceptions of the state, law and justice. Its existence, foundations, scope and effectiveness are determined by the outcome of an attempt – which has proved more or less successful throughout the different phases of its evolution – to reconcile it with the founding principles of the modern state, sovereignty and legality, inherited from the Enlightenment. Adopting a historical perspective helps us its development, on either side of the pivotal moment represented by the creation of the League of Nations: the starting point marked by the 1919 Paris Conference and the immediate aftermath of the First World War; and the turning point marked by the work of the League and international legal doctrine in the interwar era. These two crucial phases saw a string of initiatives which, rather than failures, can be interpreted as a series of necessary transformations for the emergence of a new discipline and, more generally, a profound change in the global legal and judicial order.

This chapter contains four snapshots depicting the state of international legal scholarship at the time of the League of Nations. The first captures the zeitgeist of scholarship during the interwar period and identifies some features that defined this emerging epistemic community. It also considers the extent to which scholars may have had an influence outside academic circles. The second and third snapshots focus on various intertwined debates of the time. In this regard, consideration is given to the debates on the ultimate source of international obligations and the broader discussions about scientific method and the place of ideology in international law. This is done by reference, in particular, to the approaches and/or theories followed by Kelsen, Lauterpacht, (French) legal sociology and jus naturalism. The fourth snapshot elaborates on these debates by focusing on state sovereignty as the vantage point where most doctrinal trends of the time intersect. It identifies liberalism as the ideology underpinning such criticisms and compares them with the views held, first, by controversial German scholar Carl Schmitt and. second, by Soviet legal theorists.

This chapter examines the history of international law in the Americas at the time of the League of Nations. It focuses on the pioneering role of the Americas in international organisation through the Pan American Union and the pan-Americanisation of the Monroe Doctrine, the golden years of the US-led tradition of American international law associated with the American Institute of International Law (AIIL) and its codification projects in the 1920s. It also explores the debates over intervention provoked by the codification projects advanced by the AIIL and the tensions that emerged between the continental tradition of American international law linked to the AIIL and a regional and anti-interventionist one associated with the notion of Latin American international law. This latter tradition gained wider popularity in the 1920s and began to adopt a more radical and anti-imperialist posture. These two hemispheric and regional approaches to international law declined in the 1940s and 1950s across the Americas right at the time when the United States adopted a geopolitical and globalist strategy, departing from continentalist approaches to international law.

The Paris Conference assigned the League of Nations the task of continuing to construct the new international order. This in turn would restructure the international system. Through administering institutions and adjudicating issues, the League sought to reconcile the liberalism of Wilsonianism with the realities of geopolitics. Mandates, never colonies in a legal sense, posited an alternative to colonialism, however much the mandatory powers wanted to administer them as imperial domains. Minority protection sought to re-engineer citizenship itself, so that minorities could preserve the attributes that made them minorities while enabling them to become full members of the national communities of the successor states to the multinational empires. The record of the League proved the most troubled in international security, its broadest but most ill-defined area of responsibility. In Manchuria and Ethiopia, the League proved unable to prevent determined imperial expansion on the part of Japan and Italy, two founding members. The work of the League is best assessed not in categories of ‘success’ or ‘failure’, but in the new ways it posited creating a global legal order.

In the history of international environmental law, the 1920s and 1930s and the role of the League of Nations have been neglected so far.

The chapter explores they ways the League, as one of the first institutions of its kind, started to discuss nature protection. It reveals the dilemmas of environmental and industrial–economic interest of a world that strove to overcome the aftermath of the Great War. Furthermore, the authors study the political, legal and institutional motivations that play a role in the discussions. Pressing problems – overfishing, whaling, destruction of wildlife, pollution of the coasts and seas – were brought to the attention of the League. The chapter analyses the League’s role in drafting the first conventions aiming at regulating the use of the global commons and setting the stage for future environmental governance.

Moreover, the chapter sheds light on the unique role played by transnational organizations, NGOs, civil society groups and non-state actors in campaigns and efforts for the protection of nature and the environment, and for the preservation of natural resources in a fast-changing world.

The contribution contends that current rules of diplomatic law have consolidated during the era of the League of Nations. This holds true, for instance, in relation to the main facets of the protection of diplomatic premises; that is to say, inviolability stricto sensu, the exemption from execution and the obligation to protect the premises against any intrusion. In fact, Article 22 of the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations is largely based on the rules crystallised before the extinction of the League of Nations. As for the immunities of diplomatic agents, it is precisely in this period that the distinction between acts performed by the agent in the exercise of his functions and those carried out in his personal capacity crystallised in customary international law, even though immunity in the field of private law has been applied by domestic courts in a heterogeneous manner, especially when exceptions were at issue.

If, at the beginning of the twentieth century, thanks also to the influential works of Triepel and Anzilotti, the law of state responsibility came to be regarded as a distinct field, it was only in the period between the two world wars that this area of international law became the object of an intense scientific debate. The present contribution aims to assess the development of the law of state responsibility until 1945 by focusing on the events that provided a major impulse for this development, on the attempt at codification, on the case law of international courts and tribunals, and on the new general theories developed by authors such as Strupp, Kelsen, Lauterpacht, Eagleton and Ago. While the contribution aims to deal comprehensively with the law of state responsibility and its development in the period under consideration, particular emphasis will be placed on three issues: the problems associated with attribution of wrongful conduct; the consequences of international responsibility, and in particular the debate over the role of sanctions against wrongful conduct – the early signs of the emergence of a multilateral dimension of state responsibility.

This chapter examines the Soviet theory and practice of international law during the interwar period. Soviet writers of international law such as Korovin, Pashukanis and Vyshinsky developed a Soviet theory of international law which reflected Soviet revolutionary practice. However, as the practice changed over time, Soviet scholars also came to different conclusions and sometimes vehemently disagreed with each other about the right course. The main question which preoccupied them was whether universal international law was still possible after the birth of the first state of the proletariat. While the Soviets rhetorically proposed innovations to international law – the recognition of self-determination, the end to unequal treaties with non-European nations, etc. – they had difficulties implementing these principles in their own practice. A part of the chapter is dedicated to an analysis of the Soviet Union’s membership in the League of Nations from 1934 to 1939 which ended with the country’s expulsion from the organisation soon after the conclusion of the Hitler–Stalin Pact and the aggression against Finland at the end of 1939.

This chapter examines the development of the law of the sea at the time of the League of Nations with specific focus on the entitlement to the oceans and the use of the oceans. This chapter first addresses the entitlement to and jurisdiction over marine spaces by examining the issue of the territorial sea, the contiguous zone, bays and islands. The chapter then examines the issue of the use of the oceans, focusing on the regulation of fishing and navigational rights in straits. Finally, the chapter will conclude that the era of the League of Nations can be thought to be one in which the traditional paradigm of the law of the sea was being formulated. However, the paradigm was qualified by the absence of an agreement with regard to the breadth of the territorial sea and rules regarding the delimitation of the territorial sea. In this sense, the paradigm in that period remained incomplete. Furthermore, the time was not ripe to establish a global legal framework for the conservation of marine living resources. Overall the law of the sea at the time was characterised by the reconciliation of competing interests of individual states.

Accounts concerning the world trading system usually start the debate from the negotiation of the GATT. Trade integration before the First World War, though, had been quite remarkable, and the study of this era enriches our understanding of modern institutions in at least two ways. First, a number of GATT provisions had already been shaped during discussions following the advent of the League of Nations. Second, trade integration before the First World War did not manage to put a brake on belligerent behaviour, putting to rest the old Montesquieuan idea of doux commerce. Recent developments (like the invasion of Ukraine by Russia) can be analysed in this context, so that the world trading community can better grasp the limits of trade integration, and its impact on international relations.

From the Covenant of the League of Nations (1919) to the Kellogg–Briand Pact (1928), the interwar years were punctuated by efforts to codify the right of states to resort to armed force. It is often said that the Covenant and the pact prohibited war while leaving recourse to measures short of war unregulated. This account eludes the heated debates that animated interwar scholarship regarding the scope of the prohibition of the use of force contained in these two instruments. Doctrine was, in fact, split: a (smaller) part claimed that armed reprisals were not forbidden, while another (larger) faction asserted that they were. Likewise, states had different understandings of their obligations not to ‘resort to war’ under the Covenant and the pact. This chapter uses these debates as a thread to give an overview of interwar jus ad bellum.

The chapter argues that post-1945 international human rights law cannot be understood without accounting for the interwar period and some core elements of human rights discourse which existed at the time. Whereas classical histories of human rights have focused on genealogy and teleology to spell out the advent of rights universalism, more recent work has anchored the origins of human rights in national political communities. Accounting for these new historiographies, this chapter distinguishes between nineteenth-century human rights discourse and post–Second World War international human rights law. Elements of the former and antecedents of the latter can be found in the interwar period, in particular in the legal regimes for the protection of refugees and minorities. Although it analyses the two regimes separately, it articulates their points of convergence and situates them in the context of rising nationalism and the advent of the individual as a subject of international law.

It is often assumed that private international law is disconnected from geopolitical events. Scholars of private international law assume this because they generally perceive their field as neutral and apolitical. Scholars of public international law are unaware that the two fields were enmeshed in geopolitical debates. This chapter revisits the history of private international law to expose the reckoning of a variety of actors with the way in which the field was impacted by and could respond to the geopolitical events of the day. Puzzles surrounding questions of jurisdiction and choice of law would be used to translate aspects of state succession, conflicts of nationality, vested rights, statelessness, capitulations, conflict of laws and jurisdiction in the mandates or the extraterritorial application of Russian and then Nazi laws, into familiar questions of private international law. Some of these interwar questions have contemporary parallels. Engaging with the history of private international law can offer valuable lessons when considering private international law’s current role in geopolitical events.