International Law and Empire Historical Explorations

In times in which global governance in its various forms, such as human rights, international trade law, and development projects, is increasingly promoted by transnational economic actors and international institutions that seem to be detached from democratic processes of legitimation, the question of the relationship between international law and empire is as topical as ever. By examining this relationship in historical contexts from early modernity to the present, this volume aims to deepen current understandings of the way international legal institutions, practices, and narratives have shaped specifically imperial ideas about and structures of world governance. As it explores fundamental ways in which international legal discourses have operated in colonial as well as European contexts, the book enters a heated debate on the involvement of the modern law of nations in imperial projects. Each of the chapters contributes to this emerging body of scholarship by drawing out the complexity and ambivalence of the relationship between international law and empire. They expand on the critique of western imperialism while acknowledging the nuances and ambiguities of international legal discourse and, in some cases, the possibility of counter-hegemonic claims being articulated through the language of international law. Importantly, as the book suggests that international legal argument may sometimes be used to counter imperial enterprises, it maintains that international law can barely escape the Eurocentric framework within which the progressive aspirations of internationalism were conceived

1 - Provincializing Grotius: International Law and Empire in a Seventeenth-Century Malay Mirror
2 - Indirect Hegemonies in International Legal Relations: The Debate of Religious Tolerance in Early Republican China
3 - International Law, Empire, and the Relative Indeterminacy of Narrative
4 - The Concepts of Universal Monarchy and Balance of Power in the First Half of the Seventeenth Century-a Case Study
5 - Between Faith and Empire: The Justification of the Spanish Intervention in the French Wars of Religion in the 1590s
6 - Jus gentium and the Transformation of Latin American Nature: One More Reading of Vitoria?
7 - Cerberus: The State, the Empire, and the Company as Subjects of International Law in Grotius and the Peace of Westphalia
8 - Revolution, Empire, and Utopia: Tocqueville and the Intellectual Background of International Law
9 - Towards the Empire of a 'Civilizing Nation': The French Revolution and its Impact on Relations with the Ottoman Regencies in the Maghreb
10 - A Comporting Sovereign, Tribes, and the Ordering of Imperial Authority in Colonial Upper Canada of the 1830s
11 - Territory, Sovereignty, and the Construction of the Colonial Space
12 - An Anti-Imperialist Universalism? Jus Cogens and the Politics of International Law
13 - Drift towards an Empire? The Trajectory of American Reformers in the Cold War
14 - Imperium sine fine: Carneades, the Splendid Vice of Glory, and the Justice of Empire
15 - Scepticism of the Civilizing Mission in International Law

Martti Koskenniemi is Academy Professor and Director of the Erik Castrén Institute of International Law and Human Rights at the University of Helsinki, a Professorial Fellow at Melbourne Law School, and Centennial Professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He has held visiting professorships at New York University, the University of Cambridge, the University of Utrecht, Columbia University, the University of São Paulo, the University of Toronto, and the Universities of Paris I, II, X and XVI. He was a member of the Finnish diplomatic service from 1978 to 1994 and of the International Law Commission (UN) from 2002 to 2006. His publications include From Apology to Utopia: The Structure of International Legal Argument (1989), The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law 1870-1960 (2001), The Politics of International Law (2011), and The Cambridge Companion to International Law (2012, co-edited with Professor James Crawford). Manuel Jiménez Fonseca is a doctoral researcher at the Erik Castrén Institute of International Law and Human Rights, University of Helsinki. His research interests include the historical relationship between international law and nature, development, and social movements. His publications include 'The Colonization of American Nature and the Early Developments of International Law' Journal of the History of International Law (2010) 12:189 Walter Rech is a postdoctoral researcher at the Erik Castrén Institute of International Law and Human Rights, University of Helsinki. His research interests are located in the history and theory of international law and international politics. His publications include Enemies of Mankind: Vattel's Theory of Collective Security (2013)