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.

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.