“Publique Enemies to Mankind”

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Kempe
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
International Law ◽  
International System ◽  
Central Element ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Subsequent Trial ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Sea Power

The origins of modern international law are frequently sought in the Early Modern period, and piracy has often been accorded a major role in this development, as well as in the emergence of an international system of states. The chapter highlights how international law developed through a process that Kempe calls “integration by exclusion.” Specifically, the author focuses on the piratical exploits and subsequent trial of John Cusack, executed in 1675. The case illustrates how accusations of piracy as a crime against all nations was a central element in the emergence of international law in Europe and in the establishment of England’s claim to be an effective global sea power. This demonstrated its ability to project its jurisdiction at sea far beyond the country’s shorelines.

Part II Approaches, Ch.14 Natural Law in International Legal Theory: Linear and Dialectical Presentations

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gordon Geoff
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
International Law ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Legal Theory ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Time Frame ◽  
Political Organization ◽  
Modern Period

This chapter presents an overview of three active periods of natural law scholarship bearing on international legal theory, via two stories that illustrate these to effect. The first story relates in brief the renewed attention to natural law doctrine as part of historiographical and epistemological inquiries in international law and legal theory. The second presents still another means of understanding natural law and its ongoing role in international law, namely as a dialectic by which new conceptions and vocabularies of political organization have arisen under varying historical circumstances. The chapter then traces the role of natural law doctrine as part of a linear consolidation of liberal hegemony internationally from the early modern period forward, and offers the dialectical presentation covering the same time frame. The chapter concludes by returning to how natural law continues to contribute both to the possibility of new normative programs internationally, as well as the hegemonic.

Anglo-Portuguese Relations in the Mid-Nineteenth Century: Informal Empire, Arbitration, and the Durability of an Asymmetrical Alliance*

2020 ◽  
Vol 135 (575) ◽  
pp. 836-859
Author(s):  
Gabriel Paquette
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
International Law ◽  
East Africa ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Third Party ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Informal Empire ◽  
Territorial Claims ◽  
The Rich

Abstract This article examines Anglo-Portuguese relations in the middle of the nineteenth century, particularly conflicts over territorial claims in West and East Africa. It examines how these conflicts were de-escalated and why they did not tear asunder the long-standing, if asymmetrical, alliance between Britain and Portugal. After briefly surveying Anglo-Portuguese relations in the early modern period and in the first half of the nineteenth century, the article focuses on the way that conflicts were resolved through third-party arbitration between the 1850s and 1870s. Drawing on archival research in Portugal and Britain, the article contributes to the rich historiographies on informal empire, the partition of Africa, and the emergence of international law in the context of imperial conflict and collaboration.

scholarly journals Henry V, Anachronism, and the History of International Law

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher N. Warren
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
International Law ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Henry V ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of International Law

Historians, literary scholars, and international lawyers interested in the early modern period have all grappled with the problem of anachronism, yet mostly independently of one another. This essay uses the question of war crime in Shakespeare’s Henry V to argue that early modernists interested in international law need not reject synchronic historicism for explicitly anachronistic or presentist approaches. Proposing as a new context for Shakespeare’s play a little-known humanist disputation by the civil lawyer Alberico Gentili, De amis Romanis (1599), it illuminates a juridical approach to the international past cultivated in the early modern period alongside the rise of international law—an approach closely linked with literary epistemologies.

Problems of legal systematization from De iure praedae to De iure belli ac pacis. De iure praedae Chapter II and the Prolegomena of De iure belli ac pacis compared

Grotiana ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-78 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurens Winkel
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
International Law ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Roman Law ◽  
Legal Rules ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Institutional System ◽  
Subjective Rights

AbstractA comparison between the Prolegomena of Chapter II of De iure praedae and the Prolegomena of De iure belli ac pacis leads to the conclusion that the ideas of Grotius on legal systematization have changed considerably between 1604 and 1625. Whereas Grotius starts in IPC with general principles with a rather unclear distinction between leges and regulae, in IBP he gives first the philosophical and theological basis of international law, intertwined by a concise set of general legal rules (IBP, Prol., 8), mostly derived from Roman law after its reception in Western Europe. The general outlines of legal systematization in the early-modern period are expounded. In the attempts of legal systematization the concept of subjective rights is essential. These subjective rights are not, as is sometimes assumed, a medieval renewal of legal technique, but can be found essentially already in classical Roman law of the first centuries AD.The institutional system is not yet visible in De iure praedae, it might be different for De iure belli ac pacis. Significant here are possibly the expressions ius ad bellum and ius in bello.

Too Much History

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Randall Lesaffer
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
International Law ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Just War ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Natural Right ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
State Practice ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Self Defence

This chapter examines the evolution of the jus ad bellum from the use of war as a sanction to the sanctioning of war. It provides an overview of the doctrine of just war in the Middle Ages before turning to the concepts of just and legal war in the early modern period. It considers how, during that period and the 19th century, the argument of self-defence came to play a prominent role in the justification of war, leading to a contamination of the concepts of just and legal war. It explains why the concept of legal war was abolished by the international community of states and looks at major treaties and state practice relating to war and self-defence of the interwar years leading to the formation of an international customary rule against aggression. It analyses the transfer of the natural right of self-defence to the domain of positive international law.

Diplomatic Pathos

2019 ◽  
pp. 69-84
Author(s):  
John Watkins
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
International System ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Sir Philip Sidney ◽  
Half Century ◽  
Major Powers ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Contemporary Politics ◽  
Law Of Nations ◽  
Legal Theorist

Chapter 4 explores the cultural resonances of the sixteenth-century realization that the greatest diplomatic achievements, even treaties ending a half-century of war between major powers, are vulnerable to ongoing historical experience. A conflict between extravagant hope that lasting peace might be achieved—expressed in the wake of peace settlements—and disillusioning experience—found in dispatches, speeches, legal treatises, and literary works by diplomats—repeatedly manifested itself in a pathos, sometime even a despair, that haunted diplomatic culture throughout the early modern period. The chapter traces the wider dissemination of this diplomatic pathos in works by the legal theorist Alberico Gentili and the Elizabethan writer-diplomat Sir Philip Sidney. The two men were closely enough associated that their understandings and critiques of the law of nations probably developed through mutual dialogue. Sidney was at least as interested in abstract questions of legal and diplomatic principle as he was in contemporary politics. In the Arcadia, his fantasy Mediterranean turns out to be a laboratory for experimenting with legal and strategic problems, with his two heroes, Pyrocles and Musidorus, providing military and diplomatic solutions. Nevertheless, the endpoint of both Gentili’s and Sidney’s anatomies of the emergent international system was Protestant despair over the possibility of lasting diplomatic achievements in a fallen world.

Britain and International Law in West Africa

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Inge Van Hulle
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
West Africa ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
International Law ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Legal Relationship ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Historical Relationship

Africa often remains neglected in studies that discuss the historical relationship between international law and imperialism during the nineteenth century. When it does feature, scholarly focus tends to be on the late nineteenth century and on the treaties concluded between European powers and African polities in which sovereignty and territory were ceded. Through a contextual historical analysis, Inge Van Hulle complicates this traditional narrative. By reviewing the use and creation of legal instruments that expanded or delineated the boundaries between British jurisdiction and African communities in West Africa, she highlights the practicality and flexibility of international legal discourse in imperial contexts. The chronological focus of the book is the period between the end of the eighteenth century and the 1880s which the author identifies as an important phase of legal experimentation which saw substantial deviations in the legal relationship between African polities and British imperial agents, not merely from traditional Euro-African normative patterns as they had existed during the Early Modern period, but also from inter-Western international law. By the 1880s the legal techniques that were fashioned in the language of international law in West Africa had largely developed their own substantive characteristics and which included apart from treaties of cession, also commercial treaties, the abolition of the slave trade, extraterritoriality and the use of force. During this period, legal ordering was not done in reference to adjudication before Western courts or the writings of Western learned lawyers, but in reference to what was deemed politically expedient and practically feasible by imperial agents for the preservation of social peace, commercial interaction and humanitarian agendas.

scholarly journals Die Grenzen im Kopf: Imagining walls, borders, frontiers, and national identity in Alsace/Elsaß

Konturen ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 7
Author(s):  
Peter G. Wallace
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
International Law ◽  
Ethnic Differences ◽  
Historical Development ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Political Relations ◽  
Frontier Zone ◽  
Mental Constructs

Political geographers draw distinctions in English between borders, usually conceived of as lines on a map, and frontiers, which are seen as zones. In German, Grenze, a word borrowed from Slavic, and reflecting ethnic differences is often used for both. In French frontière with its roots in medieval warfare, covers both concepts. Beginning with some considerations of Alsace/Elsaß as a frontier zone between Germany and France, this paper will review ongoing debates among historians of nationalism on the definitions of nations, states, and frontiers. It will then trace the historical development in Europe of these concepts from antiquity into the early modern period. It was during the dynastic power struggles of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that the concepts of nation and state took on fundamental political significance as rulers made claims to sovereignty in the name of historical nations and borders became enshrined in “international” law as the result of the peace treaties signed in Westphalia in 1648. The essay questions both the historical depth of nations, states, and borders and the teleological assumption of their inevitability and permanence in human political relations. Nations, states, and borders are mental constructs. They were imagined and can be reimagined. A close examination of Alsatian history shows the bloody historical effects of applying these concepts arbitrarily in a cultural borderland and the potential for a different political future for Europe by reimagining borders.

From Craft to Institution: Accounting in Italy from the Middle ages to the Early Modern Period

2012 ◽  
pp. 135-152 ◽  
Author(s):  
O. Volkova
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Social Institution ◽  
Business Environment ◽  
Technical Standards ◽  
Medieval Italy ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Professional Field

The article describes the evolution of accounting from the simple registration technique to economic and social institution in medieval Italy. We used methods of institutional analysis and historical research. It is shown that the institutionalization of accounting had been completed by the XIV century, when it became a system of codified technical standards, scholar discipline and a professional field. We examine the interrelations of this process with business environment, political, social, economic and cultural factors of Italy by the XII—XVI centuries. Stages of institutionalization are outlined.

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