Coates: Securing Hegemony through Law: Venezuela, the U.S. Asphalt Trust, and the Uses of International Law, 1904-1909

Benjamin Coates (Wake Forest Univ. - History) has published Securing Hegemony through Law: Venezuela, the U.S. Asphalt Trust, and the Uses of International Law, 1904-1909 (Journal of American History, Vol. 102, no. 2, pp. 380-405, September 2015). Here's the abstract:

Most historians remember early twentieth-century American foreign policy for the Spanish-American War, Caribbean military occupations, and the bellicose rhetoric of Theodore Roosevelt, but the era was also a time when U.S. officials sought to expand the use of international law. To make sense of this apparent contradiction, Benjamin Coates explores the attempts of a New York–based corporation to enlist the U.S. government’s aid in recovering property that the Venezuelan government seized. An investigation of the relationship between the corporation, Washington, and Caracas highlights the ways that expanding U.S. power relied not simply on breaking the law but also on promoting a beneficial legal regime.