Stephen Angle and Marina Svensson assert that prior to the mid-nineteenth century, there was not a Chinese word that translates the concept of “rights.” They hold that even though the classical and postclassical Chinese talked about “privileges and powers,” they didn’t have ideas of rights that correspond to the modern Western senses: namely, those that correspond to duties, protect the individual person, or provide “antimajoritarian trumps on the general interest.” Even though rights talk was also relatively new to the West then, Angle and Svensson claim that rights were founded on the historical Western understanding of persons as autonomous individuals. In contrast, they hold that the Chinese view persons as always already bound up in roles and relationships which, instead of developing into rights that correlate with duties as in the West, remains as talk about “reciprocal responsibilities” in their theorizing about ethics and politics.

Arguing that the prioritization of a right (or a set of rights) over others was reflective, not only of Cold War tensions between East and West, but also of the power dynamics accompanying decolonization, Barbara Keys’s chapter on the hierarchies of rights sets the stage. The reordering of rights priorities has persisted even beyond the Cold War’s end, as ongoing battles about geopolitical positioning and the distribution of economic resources. Hierarchies constantly change in the evolution of rights.

If the history of human rights shows anything, it shows that claim-making has no predetermined agents, and this volume nods to the rights of the non-human in a chapter by Jim Davies, who analyzes what might be at stake in the recognition of artificial intelligence not just as an instrumental tool, but a rights-bearing claimant in its own right. Indeed, Davies pursues this possibility through an analogy with the rise of entitlements of non-human nature, especially non-human animals.

In its opening clause, the preamble to the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) asserts the strong affinity between the concepts of human dignity and human rights. “Recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family,” the declaration grandly begins, “is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.” Preambles are repositories of lofty rhetoric, but they are also expressions of shared values and basic ideological assumptions. The expansive political claims of the UDHR find justification in the idea of human dignity. Moreover, the Declaration itself helped to cement the place of dignity in the modern discourse of rights, and the importance of dignity as a source of moral justification remains a lively theme in explorations of the origins and normative basis for human rights claims. In the words of Jeremy Waldron, for instance, “Dignity is intimately connected with the idea of rights – as the ground of rights, the content of certain rights, and perhaps even the form and structure of rights.”

In Latin ius (like droit in French, diritto in Italian, Recht in German) can mean a whole body of normative rules, a legal order, as well as “right,” in the many senses of the English word. Early in the last century, Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld proposed that English speakers resolve the ambiguity about the meaning of “right,” at least in precise legal language, by using the word “right” only where there was a correlative “duty” in another or others. If there was no correlative duty, but simply an absence of right in someone else (a “no-right”), Hohfeld preferred to say that the subject had a “privilege.” Hohfeld also proposed four other “fundamental legal categories”: “power” (another word that is sometimes encompassed in “right”), “immunity” (also sometimes encompassed in “right”), “liability,” and “disability,” categories that referred to the subject’s ability or lack thereof to change the first set of categories.

In August 1989, on the occasion of the bicentennial of the French Revolution, Le Monde published an interview with Margaret Thatcher, then Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. In that interview Thatcher, in France at the time as an honored guest of French President François Mitterrand, asserted that claims that the notion of subjective rights originated with the French Revolution, and specifically with the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of August 1789, are nonsense. The socialist French Prime Minister Michel Rocard criticized Thatcher vocally, and her arrival at the bicentennial celebrations was met with jeers, yet many historians today would agree with her, whatever their preferred origin point(s) for a concept of subjective rights. What is more controversial is Thatcher’s alternative account of the origins of the notion of subjective rights: to her, they had been invented by the Greeks, and were already foundational to Athenian democracy.

The human rights of children are now a standard part of international processes, with the Convention on the Rights of the Child protecting them, following the creation of many national provisions. However, as Linde Lindkvist argues in his chapter, even the achievement of such rights was rooted in an older paternalist conception more about according care for victims than equipping and recognizing agents. On the other hand, human rights politics appealed to some of the most powerful interests in world history, not just the weakest.

In daily debates in the UN’s various committees, imperial powers who dominated the previous world order and the postcolonial states that outnumbered them in the next clashed over political and economic sovereignty. These discussions were often about whether a new world order of free and equal states could emerge from a white-dominated world order. Self-determination and its place in international human rights law was a sticking point. Umut Özsu points out that at the height of the decolonization era (1960s–1970s), an irresolvable tension in articulating self-determination with universal human rights left questions of national sovereignty and international order unresolved. Far from being mutually exclusive rival forms of social and political mobilization, human rights and self-determination remain imbricated within the arenas of both international law and social and political activism.

One of the most revolutionary human rights treaties, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (1979), was premised on the goal of achieving equality for sexes defined in a binary manner. In a far more recent history, as Sandra Duffy reconstructs in her chapter, gender identity and how to conceptualize and recognize the rights of transgender and other claimants have been high-profile points of controversy in international fora.

After the 1940s, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) propelled human rights further into international politics, shaping notions of what they could and should be and shedding light on the need for rights protections. While not always successful at mitigating state sovereignty in the name of justice and rights, or at imposing moral norms, human rights NGOs became entangled in complex political processes of postwar human rights. The result has been a heterogeneous contribution to international human rights, guided by their diverse and changing orientation to political, cultural, and historical contingencies.

In 2007, the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples recognized their particular historical losses and protected their future as collective entities, including their distinctive claims to land. In a multi-sited genealogy, Miranda Johnson explores how long-term historical identities were reforged – in stages after World War II, and against the prevalence of assimilative ideologies – through the elaboration of common Indigenous claim-making of far-flung groups, coming to regard a parallel historic dispossession and current disempowerment.

The late ancient rabbis of Roman Palestine (ca. 2nd–5th centuries ce) are properly included in a history of rights despite the absence from their literatures of a discrete term for “rights.” Nearly a century ago, Dr. Isaac Herzog introduced “rights” as among the “fundamental concepts” requiring examination early in the first volume of his The Main Institutions of Jewish Law, which surveys and analyzes Jewish law sources from the rabbinic period through early modernity. Herzog observes that “‘Right’ and its correlative ‘duty’ are fundamental concepts in law” without which “law would be unthinkable.” He draws inter alia on John Salmond in defining a “right” as “an interest recognised and protected by a rule of right” and “any interest respect for which is a duty and the disregard of which is a wrong.” By way of illustration, Herzog observes that if A owes money to B, then B has a right against A to recover the debt. Herzog proclaims it “self-evident” that “these elemental concepts are present in Jewish law” while observing that the “ancient sources” lack terms corresponding to English law’s “right” and “duty.”

It is common to read that the concept of rights did not exist in ancient times. The most influential proponent of this thesis in the past half-century or so may be Alasdair MacIntyre but he is hardly alone. In a more recent discussion, Tom Campbell says this: “Rights (as distinct from the more general ideas of right and wrong) were unknown to the Ancient Greeks and Romans, although the idea developed in the course of medieval theorizing concerning Roman law.” A slightly more nuanced view is put forward by William Sweet: “The history of the ‘discourse’ of human rights is fairly well known. While the existence of ‘natural rights’ is implied in works of antiquity, it is only in the Middle Ages that we begin to see an acknowledgment of rights as distinct from ‘the right.’”

In terms of social and legal history, Ptolemaic Egypt is the best known of the Hellenistic kingdoms, as the dry sand conserved an abundance of papyri for centuries. Its multi-ethnic population and the combination of ancient Egyptian, Persian, and Greek cultural elements make it an even more interesting case study. A direct equivalent to the modern concept of rights probably did not exist in Ptolemaic Egypt, even if there is discussion around the terms used. Aspects of the concept of rights can be traced at different levels of intensity. Rights and duties in the sense of obligation deriving either from contract or violations of other persons or their belongings are found in hundreds of contracts, petitions, claims, or court proceedings in Greek as well as in Egyptian contexts. Beyond this two-person relationship, more abstract rights over things and persons are found relative to property, paternal authority, or slavery, which are all sometimes categorized as absolute rights today. On the other hand, to assume rights in the sense of liberties of an individual against the state or of legal power within the state is probably anachronistic.