The Law of Nations in Global History

The history and theory of international law have been transformed in recent years by post-colonial and post-imperial critiques of the universalistic claims of Western international law. The origins of those critiques lie in the often overlooked work of the remarkable Polish-British lawyer-historian C. H. Alexandrowicz (1902-75). This volume collects Alexandrowicz's shorter historical writings, on subjects from the law of nations in pre-colonial India to the New International Economic Order of the 1970s, and presents them as a challenging portrait of early modern and modern world history seen through the lens of the law of nations.

The book includes the first complete bibliography of Alexandrowicz's writings and the first biographical and critical introduction to his life and works. It reveals the formative influence of his Polish roots and early work on canon law for his later scholarship undertaken in Madras (1951-61) and Sydney (1961-67) and the development of his thought regarding sovereignty, statehood, self-determination, and legal personality, among many other topics still of urgent interest to international lawyers, political theorists, and global historians.

C. H. Alexandrowicz

Charles Henry Alexandrowicz (1902-1975) was a Polish scholar who pioneered research in the critical history of international law in the 1950s and 1960s. His works included World Economic Agencies, Law and Practice (1962); An Introduction to the History of the Law of Nations in the East Indies (1967); The Law of Global Communications (1971); and The Law-Making Functions of the Specialised Agencies of the United Nations (1973).

David Armitage is the Lloyd C. Blankfein Professor of History at Harvard University, where he teaches intellectual and international history. He is also an Affiliated Faculty member at Harvard Law School and an Affiliated Professor in Harvard's Department of Government. Among his publications are The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (2000), The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (2007), Foundations of Modern International Thought (2013), The History Manifesto (co-auth., 2014), and Civil Wars: A History in Ideas (2017).

Jennifer Pitts is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. She is author of A Turn to Empire: the rise of imperial liberalism in Britain and France (2005) and editor and translator of Alexis de Tocqueville: writings on empire and slavery (2001). She is currently completing a book,Boundaries of the International, that explores European debates over legal relations with extra-European societies during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.