Armitage & de la Rasilla: 'The Most Neglected Province': British Historiography of International Law

David Armitage (Harvard Univ. - History) & Ignacio de la Rasilla (Wuhan Univ. - Institute of International Law) have posted 'The Most Neglected Province': British Historiography of International Law (in The Cambridge History of International Law: I, Introduction, Randall Lesaffer & Anne Peters eds., forthcoming). Here's the abstract:

Every periodisation of the history of international law is inherently problematic. With this in mind, we use the general periodisation scheme of The Cambridge History of International Law to divide this chapter into five parts. First, we treat the so-called period of Western international law, 1776–1870 which parallels the first age of the British historiography of international law. This extends from Robert Ward’s Enquiry into the Foundation and History of the Law of Nations in Europe (1795) to Thomas Erskine Holland’s Oxford inaugural lecture on Alberico Gentili in 1874 although, as we shall see, the nineteenth-century cultivation of the subject in Britain was nourished by the convergence of earlier eighteenth-century streams of historical literature. The second part of this chapter examines the intellectual underpinnings of the British international legal historiography at the height of empire, which was also the great age of historicism in British international law, from roughly 1870 to 1920. The third part, in turn, examines the symbolic coming-of-age of the academic cultivation of the history of international law in the UK experienced from the establishment of the British Yearbook of International Law in 1920 up to Hersch Lauterpacht’s enunciation of the Grotian tradition of international law in the aftermath of the Second World War. The fourth part explores the influence the following ‘age of Lauterpacht’ in the decades up to 1960 on the study of the history of international law and how historiographical advances during the Cold War hiatus were to come increasingly from the semi-periphery rather than the centre and from disciplines other than international law. Finally, the fifth part briefly takes stock of the large impact the transdisciplinary ‘turn’ to the history of international law has had in challenging the traditional horizons of the British historiography of international law. The conclusion offers some reflections on the nascent field of comparative international legal history in the light of some characteristic features of its British strains over the longue durée.