Setting the Scene

Veiled Power ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 15-27
Author(s):  
Doreen Lustig

During the latter part of the nineteenth century, international lawyers begin to conceive themselves as part of a modern discipline of law. This chapter returns to the debate over the legitimacy of the operation of chartered companies in Africa during this period. The dissolution of the charters towards the end of the century was reflected in the suspension of the debate over companies in international legal commentaries for almost a century. The silence following international lawyers’ active critique over the chartered companies could be conceived as a testament to the irrelevance of international legal ideas, institutions, and practices to the history of private business corporations in colonial and other global settings. This chapter argues against such an interpretation and unravels the relevance of international law to economic actors by analysing this episode from the vantage point of the Royal Niger Company operations in Africa. I argue that the dissolution of the charters did not represent a failure, as previously thought, but rather a multifaceted transformation through which the relationship between economic agents and governmental agents was renegotiated. Further, I assert that while material conditions are crucial to understanding the chronicle of the Charter’s dissolution, international law is pivotal to unraveling the contours of the alliance that replaced them.

Author(s):  
Walter Rech

By illustrating the history of Italian international law from the early seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century, this chapter explores the question of whether and to what extent this period may have been characterized by a genuinely Italian ‘tradition’ or approach to international legal issues. The chapter questions the notion of a monolithic Italian tradition in international law and shows that the commonality of topics and interests among Italian lawyers can best be read as part of broader trends in the European ‘law of nations’. Although they were concerned with nationally important matters such as maritime trade, the sovereignty of smaller polities and the relationship between State and church, Italian lawyers constantly defended their claims by resorting to the common European vocabulary of the ius naturae and ius gentium.


Author(s):  
Paz Reut Yael

This chapter explores the inseparable nature of the relationship between religion—more specifically, Christianity—secularism and international law. As the history of international law itself reveals, its inauguration as a liberal profession depended on a group of men who shared a particular universal intuition and cultural agenda that mirrored their western Christian European and cosmopolitan backgrounds at the end of the nineteenth century. Thus, the chapter scrutinizes the Catholic School of Salamanca as a case study that mirrors how Christianity—Catholic missionarism more accurately — became an integral part of international law to date, focusing on how and why the Salamancans’ specific re-configuration of the public/private has become a resilient and persistent formula to this day.


Author(s):  
Cristina Vatulescu

This chapter approaches police records as a genre that gains from being considered in its relationships with other genres of writing. In particular, we will follow its long-standing relationship to detective fiction, the novel, and biography. Going further, the chapter emphasizes the intermedia character of police records not just in our time but also throughout their existence, indeed from their very origins. This approach opens to a more inclusive media history of police files. We will start with an analysis of the seminal late nineteenth-century French manuals prescribing the writing of a police file, the famous Bertillon-method manuals. We will then track their influence following their adoption nationally and internationally, with particular attention to the politics of their adoption in the colonies. We will also touch briefly on the relationship of early policing to other disciplines, such as anthropology and statistics, before moving to a closer look at its intersections with photography and literature.


1979 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 379-390
Author(s):  
Frederick Sontag

For some time it seemed as if Christianity itself required us to say that ‘God is in history’. Of course, even to speak of ‘history’ is to reveal a bias for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century forms of thought. But the justification for talking about the Christian God in this way is the doctrine of the incarnation. The centre of the Christian claim is that Jesus is God's representation in history, although we need not go all the way to a full trinitarian interpretation of the relationship between God and Jesus. Thus, the issue is not so much whether God can appear or has appeared within, or entered into, human life as it is a question of what categories we use to represent this. To what degree is God related to the sphere of human events? Whatever our answer, we need periodically to re-examine the way we speak about God to be sure the forms we use have not become misleading.


2018 ◽  
Vol 112 (4) ◽  
pp. 553-582 ◽  
Author(s):  
Boyd van Dijk

AbstractThe relationship between human rights and humanitarian law is one of the most contentious topics in the history of international law. Most scholars studying their foundations argue that these two fields of law developed separately until the 1960s. This article, by contrast, reveals a much earlier cross-fertilization between these disciplines. It shows how “human rights thinking” played a critical generative role in transforming humanitarian law, thereby creating important legacies for today's understandings of international law in armed conflict.


1924 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 246-259 ◽  
Author(s):  
Baron S. A. Korff

For a long time writers on international law took it for granted that the subject of their studies was a relatively recent product of modern civilization, and that the ancient world did not know any system of international law. If we go back to the literature of the nineteenth century, we can find a certain feeling of pride among internationalists that international law was one of the best fruits of our civilization and that it was a system which distinguished us from the ancient barbarians. Some of these writers paid special attention to this question of origins and endeavored to explain why the ancient world never could have had any international law.


2011 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sydney J. Shep

Emoticons are usually associated with the digital age, but they have numerous precursors in both manuscript and print. This article examines the circulation of emotional icons in nineteenth-century typographical journals as a springboard to understanding the relationship between emotion, materiality, and anthropomorphism as well the pre-digital networks of the “typographical press system.” It draws on literature from textual and typographical analysis, including the history of punctuation. It also demonstrates the ubiquity of emoticons in contemporary society and culture outside the world of computers, text messaging, and chat rooms.


Veiled Power ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 220-228
Author(s):  
Doreen Lustig

The conclusion challenges the prevailing narrative on the 1990s as the watershed period during which a new sensibility emerged towards the responsibility of private business corporations as subjects of international legal responsibility. While the prevailing account focuses on the private business corporation as a subject of responsibility, it ignores alternative conceptual frameworks that were central to debates over business regulation in international law such as businesses as participants, monopolies, or multinational corporations (MNCs). Furthermore, this narrative is frequently informed by an implicit historical account on international law’s limited influence (or none at all) on the regulation of private business corporations until the 1990s. Conversely, the conclusion draws on the findings of this book to problematize this narrative of marginality and demonstrates how the supposed marginality of the business enterprise in international law, ingrained as it is in the commonly accepted narrative, is a conceptual bias that facilitated (rather than prevented) the emergence and reach of the private business corporation and legitimized the elements in the international legal order that enabled it to thrive.


Veiled Power ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Doreen Lustig

Corporations have limited responsibilities in international law but enjoy far-reaching rights and privileges. International legal debates often conceive of this issue as a problem of business accountability for human rights violations. Conceptually, the issue of corporations in international law has focused on whether or not they are, or ought to be, recognized as ‘subjects’ of responsibility in international law and on the adequate conceptual analogy to the corporation. The introduction presents an alternative way of thinking about the role of international law and its relevance to the private business corporation. It traces the emergence of the contemporary legal architecture for corporations in international law and shows how modern international law constitutes a framework within which businesses and governments allocate resources and responsibilities—a framework that began to operate as early as the late-nineteenth century and continued throughout the twentieth century.


Author(s):  
Tan Hsien-Li

This chapter examines the relationship that Asia-Pacific regional and sub-regional organizations have with international law, looking at seven international organizations that span the region. It is commonly believed that the member states of Asia-Pacific regional organizations prefer less formalized institutions and fewer binding commitments. Conventional reasons for this include their history of colonialism, less legalistic and formalized cultures, and a preference for stricter conceptions of sovereignty. As such, their organizations are often perceived as less effective. However, the effectiveness of Asia-Pacific regional institutions should not be judged by one uniform standard. Instead they should be judged on their own definition of effectiveness. There should be a broader understanding that Asia-Pacific states consciously use and participate in their regional organizations differently than in other regions, and they may prefer less institutionalized models as these serve their purposes better and can still be successful.


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