OUVRAGE : M. Koskenniemi, W. Rech, M. Jiménez Fonseca (eds.), International Law and Empire: Historical Explorations

Martti KOSKENNIEMI, Walter RECH, Manuel JIMÉNEZ FONSECA

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

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Martti Koskenniemi, Introduction 

Part I. EPISTEMOLOGIES OF EMPIRE AND INTERNATIONAL LAW

1. Arthur Weststeijn, Provincializing Grotius: International Law and Empire in a Seventeenth-Century Malay Mirror
2. Stefan Kroll, Indirect Hegemonies in International Legal Relations: The Debate of Religious Tolerance in Early Republican China
3. Walter Rech, International Law, Empire, and the Relative Indeterminacy of Narrative

Part II. LEGAL DISCOURSES OF EMPIRE

4. Peter Schröder, The Concepts of Universal Monarchy and Balance of Power in the First Half of the Seventeenth Century-a Case Study
5. Randall Lesaffer, Between Faith and Empire: The Justification of the Spanish Intervention in the French Wars of Religion in the 1590s
6. Manuel Jiménez Fonseca, Jus gentium and the Transformation of Latin American Nature: One More Reading of Vitoria
7. José-Manuel Barreto, Cerberus: The State, the Empire, and the Company as Subjects of International Law in Grotius and the Peace of Westphalia
8. Julie Saada, Revolution, Empire, and Utopia: Tocqueville and the Intellectual Background of International Law

Part III. MANAGING EMPIRE: IMPERIAL ADMINISTRATION AND DIPLOMACY

9. Christian Windler, Towards the Empire of a 'Civilizing Nation': The French Revolution and its Impact on Relations with the Ottoman Regencies in the Maghreb
10. P.G. McHugh, A Comporting Sovereign, Tribes, and the Ordering of Imperial Authority in Colonial Upper Canada of the 1830s
11. Luigi Nuzzo, Territory, Sovereignty, and the Construction of the Colonial Space

Part IV. A LEGAL CRITIQUE OF EMPIRE?

12. Umut Özsu, An Anti-Imperialist Universalism? Jus Cogens and the Politics of International Law
13. Hatsue Shinohara, Drift towards an Empire? The Trajectory of American Reformers in the Cold War
14. Benjamin Straumann, Imperium sine fine: Carneades, the Splendid Vice of Glory, and the Justice of Empire
15. Andrew Fitzmaurice, Scepticism of the Civilizing Mission in International Law

Martti KOSKENNIEMI, Walter RECH, Manuel JIMÉNEZ FONSECA (eds.), International Law and Empire: Historical Explorations, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2017 (416 pp.)