This chapter begins with Ben Golder’s reflection on the meaning and stakes of genealogical histories that have prevailed in some quarters of the historiography of the twentieth century. Golder observes that the field of inquiry has generally moved on from “vindicatory” accounts of human rights politics to ones that demystify and problematize the evolution of those politics in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. But Golder insists that there is no one way of problematizing dominant stories, and genealogy opens up a project of locating other perspectives from around the world and other voices in the making of human rights norms and politics.

The concept of rights as the bedrock of legal systems arose in modernity. This fact derives from a variety of contingent circumstances, some historical, others epistemological. Yet the building blocks from which the edifice of rights discourse is constructed were assembled and shaped in premodernity. The oldest strata in the quarry from which legal rights derive is surely classical, insights and postulates explored first by the Greeks beginning in the fifth century bce and incorporated into legal praxis through Roman law, particularly in the high imperial centuries. They were then kept alive and further developed in the late Middle Ages when the twelfth- and thirteenth-century glossators and in turn the fourteenth-century nominalist William of Ockham first articulated most of the principles out of which the sixteenth-century Spanish scholastics, seventeenth-century humanists, and eighteenth-century social contract theorists would develop full-fledged elaborations of rights-based law.

Anne-Isabelle Richard and Stella Krepp discuss regional rights projects through which Latin American and African state and non-state actors tried, with limited success, to position their regions competitively in a politically and economically decolonizing world, even as European regional rights projects shored up the political and economic sovereignty of European states, both at home and in overseas territories. While regional projects invested human rights with local meanings, which was key to their acceptance and adoption across regions, they mostly failed to create the world of non-domination that postcolonial states pursued.

The concept of a right, and the idea of human rights, were familiar abstractions on the brink of the twentieth century. But the history of political mobilization since shows that human rights had a transformative capacity in that century that no prior age had demonstrated. Through the twentieth century, human rights became institutionalized internationally in laws, movements, and organizations that transcended state-based citizenship and governance – which irrevocably changed the politics around them. Rights continued to evolve as the imperial world order transitioned to a postcolonial world of sovereign states as a primary form of political organization. Through twenty-six essays from experts around the world demonstrating how this period is historically distinctive, the fifth volume of The Cambridge History of Rights is a comprehensive and authoritative reference for the history of rights in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Emma Stone Mackinnon considers how petitioning became a mechanism for flagging racial injustice in societies where disenfranchisement largely overlapped with racial identity. Both colonialists and those subject to colonialism understood that imperial protections of the political, civil, and economic rights of a few coinciding with their denial to a subjugated majority enabled metropolitan powers to dominate globally. The discussion of rights at the UN and in postwar NGOs became more urgent as serious violations – arbitrary arrest, emergency law, torture, summary execution, forced displacement, passbook systems, the expropriation of land, and recolonization wars – issued from territories under European administration in the Empire’s twilight. But an anti-colonial bloc comprised of newly decolonized states, with Soviet support, proposed that self-determination figure as a human right in the international covenant under preparation in the UN’s Third Committee. The contentious relationship between sovereignty, rights, and race in human rights discussions reconfigured all three in the international world order of states as the work of drafting the human rights covenants proceeded at the UN.

Rights claims articulated with transregional advocacy in imperial settings as well, becoming a generalizable feature of the twentieth-century imperial world order. Politics of difference and systems of variegated rights, long crucial for building empire, were generative of rights claims-making in non-sovereign territories. Rights talk had political repercussions in European-ruled territories, making rights activism a defining characteristic of modern colonialism.

In privileging collective over individual rights, Ned Richardson-Little points out, socialist states aligned themselves with the Third World. The concept of rights is usually seen as distant and foreign to communism where the Party reigned supreme and law was only a fiction. From the Russian Revolution onward, however, rights played an important role in communist ideology and politics around the world. Communist conceptions of rights cannot be reduced to a belief in collective freedom at the expense of the individual, nor the realization of social and economic rights in place of political and civil rights. According to communist theorists and leaders, rights played a vital role in defining the goals of the socialist revolution, in delineating the political and economic order of post-revolutionary societies and demarcating the conflict lines of the international order. Rejecting both the liberal and natural rights traditions of their political rivals, communists enacted their own reimagining of rights as instruments of the state working to further the cause of the socialist revolution.

For Alden Young and Tinashe Nyamunda, development as a right did no more to further decolonization processes. Rather, development served as a “common language through which both the former colonizers and the ascendant nationalist elites could speak to one another,” setting the stage for “an imperialism of free trade” rather than promoting the rights of the poor and disenfranchised. If decolonization processes remain incomplete as many contributors to this section suggest, so too do aspirational processes of political and economic freedom expressed in the language of rights as racial equality, self-determination, and economic sovereignty.

This volume closes with Brenna Bhandar’s fascinating inquiry into how rights bear on housing. Adequate housing is one of the older goals of mobilizational struggle, consecrated in such instruments as the UDHR and the post-Apartheid South African Constitution. At the same time, Bhandar documents, its salience has arisen in the age of financialization and neoliberalism, with their consequences for the precariously homed or unhomed. Human rights struggles do not always identify and therefore do not challenge the very culprits for the violence of the norms they invoke; but even here, Bhandar closes by invoking a “right to the city” that would overcome this long-standing limitation of human rights history, which is to multiply in their agents and domains, but not always in ways that undermine power or wealth locally or globally.

The ancient world existed before the modern conceptual and linguistic apparatus of rights, and any attempts to understand its place in history must be undertaken with care. This volume covers not only Greco-Roman antiquity, but ranges from the ancient Near East to early Confucian China; Deuteronomic Judaism to Ptolemaic Egypt; and rabbinic Judaism to Sasanian law. It describes ancient normative conceptions of personhood and practices of law in a way that respects their historical and linguistic particularity, appreciating the distinctiveness of the cultures under study while clarifying their salience for comparative study. Through thirteen expertly researched essays, Volume i of The Cambridge History of Rights is a comprehensive and authoritative reference for the history of rights in the global ancient world and highlights societies that the field has long neglected.

Is there anything in the ancient world that deserves to be called a “right” in the subjective sense? The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre stated quite apodictically that “there is no expression in any ancient or medieval language correctly translated by our expression ‘a right’ until near the close of the middle ages: the concept lacks any means of expression in Hebrew, Greek, Latin or Arabic, classical or medieval, before about 1400,” concluding from this that even if there were such rights, “no one could have known that there were.” Until relatively recently, historians would have agreed with MacIntyre. The prevailing view was that in antiquity we look in vain for what has come to be called subjective rights – that neither the concept of rights nor the word “right” could be encountered in the ancient world in its subjective sense.

Kerri Woods surveys how, when it comes to the environment, the anthropocentrism of most of the history of human rights politics meant that its incorporation of claims on behalf of nature and those most affected by its degradation have waited a long time. Nonetheless, in recent decades they have exploded. At stake is not just the recognition of who in particular among human beings environmental degradation hurts, or recognition of the moral significance of future generations, but potentially turning rights language into a tool for non-human protection as an intrinsic good, just as Davies suggests when it comes to artificial intelligence. At the same time, Woods shows, the intersection of environmental concern and rights history opens up new quandaries about assigning responsibility for harm and regulating supraterritorially.

The Hebrew Bible with its strident championing of the oppressed is frequently associated with the development of human rights. Renowned for its bold account of the emancipation of the Israelite slaves from Egypt, its impact on the later beliefs in freedom and human dignity is immense. Yet is it appropriate to associate its laws with the origin of this principle, since the term itself (זכויות אדם in Hebrew) is absent in the Pentateuch – and where it is anachronistic to impose this post-Enlightenment concept on these ancient sources?

If rights are at stake in the health of the body, it is now increasingly second nature to think they are in the aftermath of violence conflict or immense wrongdoing. Memory of violence is one way rights politics have been made meaningful. Bonny Ibhawoh observes that memory – including a right to memory – has been a focal point of rights mobilizations around the world. At the same time as recasting collective understanding of the past is itself an object of contemporary politics, competition over memory – including who is entitled to narrative privileging and why – has followed suit.

As Kamari Maxine Clarke likewise explores in her chapter, the intersection of rights and “transitional justice” in diverse situations has become one of the defining features of our time. Narrating the classic role of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission after the end of Apartheid, Clarke dramatizes the struggle over the meaning of transition, distinguishing between the “moralistic” goal of forgiveness and the more confrontational demand for accountability. For Clarke, the performativity of justice – it is always rendered by someone – means the history of human rights needs to be equally attentive to when it is not provided or when crimes are perpetrated or mistakes made in its name. What we see is that particular transitional justice speech acts enable the reproduction of particular types of power.

Where Clarke examined examples from Rwanda and the 2013 intervention in Libya in order to protect civilians, Boyd van Dijk reminds us that the means of war have long been regulated by humanitarian aspirations quite apart from the humanitarian ends cited for launching it. And, as van Dijk reveals, there have been persistent attempts to “fuse” such humanitarian concern with the concept of human rights or with the legal framework or mobilizational strategies associated with it. Like Clarke, van Dijk does not want to tell an uplifting story, for the fusion of human rights and war could equally produce what he calls “human rights warriors.”

Taking up different traditions, although also starting out with the 1940s UNESCO survey of philosophical ideas, Jessica Whyte provides a panorama of more skeptical voices about either the idea of human rights or the movements around it or both. One question for anyone reading these chapters in order is whether historians have accumulated more information about or richer interpretations of forms of human rights politics between past and present than either philosophical or critical commentators have grasped.