Historians have long known that leaders of the American Revolution looked to the law of nations for insight into the rights and obligations of independent states. In so doing, Americans relied largely on the writings of European legal theorists, such as Hugo Grotius and Emerich de Vattel, whose treatises on the law of nations are regarded today as having laid the foundations of international law. As this article demonstrates, however, early modern statesmen did not base their conduct on such treatises, but on a customary law of nations that they derived from precedent and the text of earlier treaties. This article elucidates the distinction between the customary and theoretical branches of the law of nations. It then goes on to examine the law of nations’ impact on revolutionary-era diplomacy, drawing particular attention to a series of wartime negotiations over rights to the Mississippi River. As the article shows, most American emissaries lacked experience with the customary laws of diplomacy and struggled to use that law effectively in their negotiations. The most serious consequences were averted due in part to French legal advice, and because one American, John Jay, acquired enough competence in customary law to guide his colleagues toward an effective negotiation of peace.

Together Cæsar and Cotton left an immense trove of English state papers on all matters of subjects. While Cæsar spent much of his lifetime as an officer of state, e.g., Master of the Rolls, they both devised innumerable works of great value. For instance, both he and Cotton expounded upon the issue of the post-nati and other arguments made in the conferences on the union with Scotland in Parliament. With their cessation in 1607, Cæsar undertook his most significant follow-up work: “That neither any General Statute nor Nativity only make a Man (whose Parents were Strangers) to be a Natural Subject in any Country.” Later duplicated by Cotton in Titus, F. IV., the intricacies of its two pages remained long-guarded in the private possession of such great men as Lords, Secretaries of State, and Prime Ministers. Only two centuries after Cæsar commenced its work did it come full circle to the British Museum—itself, ironically, formed from the seized library of Cotton. As for legal precedent, it is unique in that its broad historical scope predated the complexities of England's permanent royal colonies in America. During this period, every regnant—except for Charles I and James II—would assent unto major naturalization or alien statutes during their reign, all of which remained common law throughout England, the Empire, and America until, at the least, 1863.

In 1923, Haudenosaunee leader Deskaheh Levi General traveled to Geneva and launched a campaign for Indigenous statehood at the League of Nations. Drawing on a not-so-distant imperial past, the campaign was a novel attempt to use international law to assert Indigenous sovereignty. The Haudenosaunee claim hinged on a seemingly impossible conceit: that an independent native polity might persist within the borders of a settled state. The League of Nations’ primary institutional frameworks for grappling with other such problematic sovereignties were minority treaties and the mandate regime. But the Haudenosaunee case, which hinged on the persistence rather than the novelty of sovereignty, fit within neither paradigm. Their campaign illuminates a larger crisis of legal legibility that characterized Indigenous-settler relations from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. By reading Indigenous history into international legal history, this paper shows how Haudenosaunee people leveraged older norms of imperial relationality in their engagements with international law. In doing so, it revises a persistent genealogical account of the history of Indigenous human rights in favor of a more capacious narrative of Indigenous internationalism.

Formal membership in a state has been an essential political status for well over a century. It is typically gained at birth, either jus soli or jus sanguinis. Jus soli assigns nationality by birth in a nation's territory; jus sanguinis assigns children their parents’ nationality. This article provides an alternative intellectual history of the modern dominance of these principles for attributing nationality. Contrary to prior scholarship, soli and sanguinis were not restatements of existing principles. The soli/sanguinis binary was a nineteenth-century invention. Old-regime European empires attributed membership in the community under one or another single natural law principle. Parentage and birthplace were mostly evidence of conformity. In the early nineteenth century, officials in multiple jurisdictions began prioritizing positive law above natural law and transformed parentage and birthplace into competing principles for assigning nationality. This movement crystallized in 1860 when Charles Demolombe introduced jus soli and jus sanguinis to nationality law as competing, ostensibly ancient legal traditions. The framework spread quickly because it was a useful way to assign nationality despite states’ conflicting approaches to political membership. Yet, as its role in United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898) helps illustrate, the invented tradition has also obscured our understanding of more complex historical dynamics.

This article republishes a series of documents concerning citizenship rights for African Americans who were abroad. Twice during the 1850s the U.S. Secretary of State (William L. Marcy) issued instructions to consuls where he spelled out the relationship between race and citizenship for individuals who were beyond the borders of the United States. Because citizenship was not clearly defined the antebellum period, either in law or practice, the Secretary's guidance offers an important set of documents that scholars from a variety of fields can incorporate into their scholarship and teaching.

In 1788, Andrew Jackson acquired an enslaved woman named Nancy. According to most accounts, Nancy followed Jackson from Jonesborough, Tennessee to Nashville and lived out the rest of her days at the Hermitage. Except she did not. A close review of the legal record suggests that Nancy never made it to Nashville and either left Jackson somewhere along the Wilderness Road or died at his hands trying to escape. Her act of resistance, this article posits, may have profoundly affected Jackson's views of race and sex on the southern frontier.

Knowledge of the Arandora Star is no longer limited to members of the UK's historic Italian community but is shared by a much larger constituency thanks to the greater accessibility of historical documents relating to the sinking of the ship, and to the substantial volume of new creative work inspired by it. This article examines this expansion of historical memory by following two discrete but entangled strands. The first follows the construction of the Arandora Star archive, starting from the author's chance personal encounter with a photograph. The second involves a close reading of Francine Stock's A Foreign Country (1999) and Caterina Soffici's Nessuno può fermarmi (2017), two novels that explore how people outside the historic Italian community recognise their implication in the sinking and its aftermath. Both foreground the intergenerational and transnational transmission of difficult memory and the ways in which the Arandora Star functions as an unstable point of historical knowledge and ethical judgement.

During the Second World War, Germans, Austrians and Italians living in Great Britain were designated as ‘enemy aliens’ and consequently interned. The worsening situation on the continent in May and June 1940 stirred up hysteria that spies and saboteurs could be amongst the Germans and Austrians. Mass arrests started in May 1940, and Italians were soon caught up in the detentions when Mussolini declared war on 10 June, thus filling internment camps to capacity. Canada and Australia agreed to take some of the ‘most dangerous characters’, facilitating the most controversial aspect of internment – deportation – which led to the ultimate tragedy when the SS Arandora Star was torpedoed and sunk on 2 July 1940. Building on previous scholarship that focuses on either German or Italian internment, this article examines both government policy towards and the internee experience of these two groups on an equal footing, thus furthering integration of the Italian narrative within internment historiography.

This paper critically reviews and examines the available data concerning Italians embarked on the SS Arandora Star on 30 June 1940. It encompasses their fate on 2 July when the ship was sunk, their subsequent journeys and the sources used to verify the conclusions. The principal aim is to establish, as far as is possible, the precise number, correct names and other details of those who were embarked on the ship. A fully validated ‘Embarkation Listing’ is published here for the first time.

This article progresses Second World War historiography of ‘enemy alien’ internment, especially of the SS Arandora Star, sunk in 1940 with a high loss of Italian civilian lives. Employing a new paradigm, that of the deathscape, defined as a topography of death and the practices that surround it, this investigation recontextualises Arandora Star remembrance in Scotland. Ambiguous loss, complicated grieving, disenfranchisements in mourning and absences in multiple layers of the deathscape form overarching themes that are explored in parallel to emotional-affective memory. The previously neglected study of individual memorialisation, both private and ‘official’, provides an important primary source in the fragmented materiality of the deathscape, allowing fresh insight on both cultural manifestations and political context. As the material and cultural apex of the deathscape, the Italian Cloister Garden and Arandora Star Memorial in Glasgow, created by Archbishop Mario Conti in 2011, are evaluated through the lenses of leadership, identity and heritage activism.

Within British-Italian history of the Second World War, there are several questions surrounding the sinking of the SS Arandora Star, on 2 July 1940, which still remain problematic. Nevertheless, this tragedy continues to play a prominent role in the heritage and memories of the Anglo-Italian communities in the UK. This article focuses on the experiences and memories of the Arandora Star from the perspective of members of the Italian community in the North-East of England. Oral histories of Italian civilian internees who were embarked onto the ocean liner were collected via qualitative interviews with descendants of victims and survivors. This article contributes to raising awareness of Arandora scholarship by articulating how memories were interpreted retrospectively and transmitted down generations. Informing the debate on the purpose of misremembering in oral history, this article sheds light on the events and their imaginary reconstruction.

Mukti Mangharam’s Freedom Inc.: Gendered Capitalism in New Indian Literature and Culture, conducts a though investigation into the culture and ideology of neoliberal capitalism being produced in India today. But Mangharam’s approach is not to dismiss but to take seriously the appeal of individualism and entrepreneurism among its target audience: ordinary people looking for a way out of the material crises that neoliberalism has produced. In this response to Freedom Inc., Pranav Jani recognizes the empathetic and democratic impulse in Mangharam’s method and narrative style and finds a parallel in his own work as a scholar and organizer. How can scholars and activists concerned with the voice of the people recognize the fundamental heterogeneity of popular consciousness, neither romanticizing struggle nor foreclosing the possibility of reform, or even revolutionary change?

This survey introduces the reader to the history of international zones. It argues that they offer striking insights into peacekeeping during the transition from a world of formal empires to one dominated by sovereign states. While the study of international zones is not new, there has been little examination of internationalization in practice. The survey suggests some of the benefits of adopting this approach and findings it might unearth.

This exploratory text proposes a US imperial ‘research perspective’ on post-war post-colonial cities – cities that the United States did not colonially occupy, i.e. not cities like Manila, 1898–1946. US imperial actors and interests helped shape such cities, and in turn were shaped by their people and structures. Importantly, the US case seems to strengthen the general recent view, also regarding formal empires, that it makes little sense to posit the existence of an imperial city type, and more sense to use ‘the imperial urban’ as a research perspective.