Koskenniemi Martti, Rech Walter, Fonseca Manuel Jimenez (eds.) International Law and Empire: Historical Explorations

Oxford University Press, 2017. — 417 p. — ISBN 978–0–19–879557–5.This book is an attempt make sense of the highly complex, shifting, and allusive relationship between law and empire by examining key aspects of its history across the globe from AD to the present. It takes a broad and nuanced view of what constitutes ‘international law’ and, more problematical still, what constitutes an ‘empire’. For all too often the easy dismissal of international law as the mere instrument of empire depends upon a willfully ill- defined, all- embracing, notion of both. This book, while never dropping into the simple association of ‘empire’ with all and any kind of hegemony or military and economic power, nevertheless takes the term ‘empire’ to express, as its Latin original did, a wide spectrum of both theories and practices of power across states and peoples. Similarly ‘international law’ is understood by the authors to include not merely the formal structure of legal discourses, but also institutions, colonial, administrative and diplomatic practices, and their like. No study of international law and empire, however conceived, can escape being largely Eurocentric, if only because both ‘international law’ and ‘empire’ as they have been understood over the past five hundred years are European concepts. They are by no means, however, exclusively European phenomena. The book, therefore, also examines non- European imperial locations: South America, China, the Malay Archipelago, Maghreb Africa, and the Ottoman Empire, bringing to it a global reach few previous studies have attempted.