In this chapter, the historiography of international law in East Asia is approached and critiqued as a tale of two centrisms, i.e. Sinocentrism and Eurocentrism. The historiography of international law in the region prior to the ‘encounter’ between East Asia and Europe has been largely Sinocentric. It is suggested that the traditional East Asian order be reinterpreted through the concept of ‘asymmetrical mutuality’ under which the regional actors of differentiated subjectivity were able to reconcile and manage their diverging interests through the crucial intermediary of diplomatic rituals. The historiography of the post-‘encounter’ period can be characterised as Eurocentric, being premised on the overwhelming positional superiority of Europe over East Asia. This traditional narrative is critically revisited (again) through the prism of ‘asymmetrical mutuality’. Despite Europe’s overwhelming dominance, East Asians articulated a wide variety of responses to the onset of a new normative discourse claiming universal validity, demonstrating their agency (if restricted). Critical engagement with Eurocentrism in the historiography of international law, one of the core questions of today’s historiography of international law, inevitably gives rise to the question of how to view universality. As a cautionary tale from this region, an attempt in interwar Japan to construct its own historiography of international law and relations by rejecting the universality articulated by the West (a ‘historiography of Sonderweg’) is investigated. By way of conclusion, it is suggested that the history of international law be reconceived as the fusing together of diverse normative voices through an intersubjective dialogue based on mutual recognition, rather than as the self-realisation of a certain universalistic normative discourse.

This chapter periodises the British historiography of international law in five parts. Its first period extends from Robert Ward’s Enquiry into the Foundation and History of the Law of Nations in Europe (1795) to Thomas Erskine Holland’s Oxford inaugural lecture on Alberico Gentili (1874), and traces the gradual professionalisation of the discipline and its historical strain. The second part examines the entanglement of empire and historicism in British international legal historiography from around 1870 to roughly 1920. The third part treats the symbolic coming of age of British international legal historiography, between the founding of the British Yearbook of International Law in 1920, and Hersch Lauterpacht’s pivotal enunciation of the so-called ‘Grotian’ tradition of international law after the Second World War. The fourth part explores the history of international law in the succeeding ‘age of Lauterpacht’ up to c. 1960, when historiographical advances came increasingly from the semi-periphery rather than the centre and from disciplines other than international law. The fifth part takes stock of the transdisciplinary ‘turn’ to the history of international law in the British world and the chapter concludes with reflections on the nascent field of comparative international legal history in the light of British developments over the longue durée.

Until about twenty-five years ago, economic historians (both those in economics departments and in history departments) had little to say about international law. There possible causes of this (beyond the possible insignificance of international law to the project of economic history) are likely the similar intellectual bases for economics and international law prior to the twentieth century, the lack of an accessible archival and intellectual base upon which to conduct the research, and the professional bias of academic historians against writing about events to close to the present. But as time as marched onward, the development of international economic law in the twentieth century has become of increasing interest to historians broadly interested in the history of international institutions and capitalism.

This chapter deals with the historiography of international law in tsarist Russia, the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia, as well as other successor states of the Soviet Union. It examines how the understanding of international law has changed in this geographic space, depending on ideologies and needs of the time. Historical contributions and interpretations of outstanding international lawyers and diplomats such as Shafirov, Martens, Baron Taube, Hrabar (Grabar), Kozhevnikov and others are mapped and discussed. Moreover, the chapter also maps how Russian, Soviet and post-Soviet scholars have understood the role of their respective countries in the global history of international law, especially the complex and sometimes problematic role of the Soviet Union and Russia.

This chapter discusses the overlooked and often ignored historiography of the history of international law in Africa. It argues that this absence is a symptom of the myth of African ahistoricity before the coming of European imperialism and the idea that the advent of intellectual independence only came after decolonisation. In order to overcome this exclusion scholars should abandon the disciplinary tools and markers of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western international law that are usually employed when establishing the canon of the history of international law. Instead, the chapter proposes that pan-Africanism can offer a lens through which to view African and Black authors’ historical engagement with histories of international law on the continent. Unlike their European contemporaries, most pan-African authors were not interested in analysing detailed state practice, but had a far more ambitious project: to construct a new world order based on racial equality and self-determination. In that sense, what they were interested in was forging anew the very foundations on which international law and international relations had been built.

Latin American international lawyers are prolific historians. However, while having profusely written histories of international law, Latin Americans have shied away from historiographic controversy. Latin Americans have not disagreed much about how to conceive and write history, but they have had sound disagreements about the international law that is constructed by history, they have disagreed over different ways of using history as law. This chapter offers a history of these disagreements. Some Latin-Americans have used universal histories, echoing the familiar Eurocentric history from the Latin-American periphery to the core, in order to gain doctrinal authority to speak and change international law. With a similar goal in mind, other Latin-Americans have used particularistic histories, foregrounding the region’s doctrinal divergences and contributions to universal international law. Universalist and particularistic histories were dominant between the first half of the nineteenth century and the second half of the twentieth century, between independence and the Cold War. Towards the end of the Cold War, these two types of history merged into one, presenting the region’s historical trajectory as in harmony with universal international law. This represents a break. If in the nineteenth century an international legal tradition emerged in Latin-America, during the twentieth century it radicalised, diverging from international law as conceived from the West. From the Cold War merger an endemic history emerged, which depoliticised and deradicalised the Latin American tradition. Exploring this history of history-writing in the region may help rearticulating a more ambitious Latin American international law.

By purpose and design The Cambridge History of International Law is situated at the forefront of the drive towards more global perspectives on the history of international law. This chapter accounts for the foundational choices and general architecture of the series. It does so by, first, surveying the broad outline of the evolution of the historiography of international law as an academic discipline since its first emergence in the latter half of the nineteenth century in terms of gradually overcoming the many self-imposed epistemological and mental constraints of the traditional state-centric and Eurocentric historiography. Second, the chapter assesses current methodological debates among historians of international law hailing from different disciplines – primarily law and history – within the broader contexts of general legal-history debates. The third section of the chapter indicates how the architecture of the series is purported to advance the agenda of the globalisation of the field, through a focus on the diverse histories of international law in various regions of the world.

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 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.

This chapter narrates a history of the history of international law as a species of European historical jurisprudence born of the nineteenth century. It connects this historical jurisprudence with a wider atmosphere of historicism and its intellectual antecedents and descendents, including (but not limited to) so-called ‘progress narratives’. It argues that the history of international law in this specific sense largely vanished after the Second World War, and the history of international law underwent two distinct rebirths: as part of the anti-colonial legal arguments repudiating the colonial structures and presuppositions of international legal thought, and as part of a critique of a renewed historicism and civilisational progressivism between 1989 and the present. But the second revival of the history of international law coincided with emergent histories of empire, international history, histories of international political thought and global history. The result is an exploding field of scholarship with objects and subjects of many kinds connected to the international and the global and their laws, institutions and practices.