Orford, Anne: International Law and the Politics of History

As the future of international law has become a growing site of political struggle within and between powerful states, debates over the history of international law have become increasingly heated. Anne Orford explores the political stakes of these debates over international law's past and its relation to empire and capitalism.'International Law and the Politics of History is a powerful rejoinder to the critical excesses to which scholarship in international law has been made subject in recent years by historians claiming law's habitual misrepresentation of its past. Anne Orford knows her own field far better than the complainants, and it shows. Historians would do well to understand better what they poke before they decide to poke it.' Christopher Tomlins, Elizabeth Josselyn Boalt Professor of Law, University of California, Berkeley