BOOK: C.H. ALEXANDROWICZ (ed. David ARMITAGE & Jennifer PITTS), The Law of Nations in Global History. Oxford: OUP, 2017, 464 p. ISBN 9780198766070, £ 80

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Oxford University Press publishes an edition of the work of C.H. Alexandrowicz, edited by David Armitage and Jennifer Pitts (The Law of Nations in Global History).

Book summary: 

The history and theory of international law have been transformed in recent years by post-colonial and post-imperial critiques of the universalistic claims of Western international law. The origins of those critiques lie in the often overlooked work of the remarkable Polish-British lawyer-historian C. H. Alexandrowicz (1902-75). This volume collects Alexandrowicz's shorter historical writings, on subjects from the law of nations in pre-colonial India to the New International Economic Order of the 1970s, and presents them as a challenging portrait of early modern and modern world history seen through the lens of the law of nations. The book includes the first complete bibliography of Alexandrowicz's writings and the first biographical and critical introduction to his life and works. It reveals the formative influence of his Polish roots and early work on canon law for his later scholarship undertaken in Madras (1951-61) and Sydney (1961-67) and the development of his thought regarding sovereignty, statehood, self-determination, and legal personality, among many other topics still of urgent interest to international lawyers, political theorists, and global historians.

Table of contents:

1: 'This Modern Grotius': An Introduction to the Life and Thought of C.H. Alexandrowicz, David Armitage and Jennifer Pitts
PART ONE: THE EARLY HISTORY OF THE LAW OF NATIONS
2: Kautilyan Principles and the Law of Nations (1965-66)
3: Paulus Vladimiri and the Development of the Doctrine of the Coexistence of Christian and Non-Christian Countries (1963)
4: Mogul Sovereignty and the Law of Nations (1955)
PART TWO: ASIA AND THE LAW OF NATIONS
5: 'Jus Gentium' and the Law of Nature in Asia (1956)
6: Some Problems in the History of the Law of Nations in Asia (1963)
7: Le Droit des Nations aux Indes Orientales: Aux XVIe, XVIIe, XVIIIe siècles (1964)
8: Grotius and India (1954)
9: Freitas Versus Grotius (1959)
10: The Discriminatory Clause in South Asian Treaties in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (1957)
11: A Persian-Dutch Treaty in the Seventeenth Century (1958)
12: Puffendorf-Crull and the Afro-Asian World (1968-69)
13: A Treatise by J. H. G. Justi on Asian Government (1960-61)
14: Doctrinal Aspects of the Universality of the Law of Nations (1961)
15: G. F. de Martens on Asian Treaty Practice (1964)
16: The Continuity of the Sovereign Status of China in International Law (1956)
17: The Legal Position of Tibet (1954)
18: Is India a Federation? (1954)
PART THREE: AFRICA AND THE LAW OF NATIONS
19: Le Rôle des Traités dans les Relations entre les Puissances Européennes et les Souverains Africains (Aspects historiques) (1970)
20: The Partition of Africa by Treaty (1974)
21: The Role of Treaties in the European-African Confrontation in the Nineteenth Century (1975)
22: The Role of German Treaty Making in the Partition of Africa (1980)
23: The Juridical Expression of the Sacred Trust of Civilization (1971)
PART FOUR: THE RECOGNITION OF NEW STATES IN INTERNATIONAL LAW
24: Empirical and Doctrinal Positivism in International Law (1974-75)
25: The Theory of Recognition in Fieri (1958)
26: The Quasi-Judicial Function in the Recognition of States and Governments (1952)
27: Israel in Fieri (1951)
28: New and Original States: The Issue of Reversion to Sovereignty (1969)
29: The New States and International Law (1974)
30: The Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States (1975)
Bibliography of the Writings of C. H. Alexandrowicz

On the author and the editors:

Charles Henry Alexandrowicz (1902-1975) was a Polish scholar who pioneered research in the critical history of international law in the 1950s and 1960s. His works included World Economic Agencies, Law and Practice (1962); An Introduction to the History of the Law of Nations in the East Indies (1967); The Law of Global Communications (1971); and The Law-Making Functions of the Specialised Agencies of the United Nations (1973).
David Armitage is the Lloyd C. Blankfein Professor of History at Harvard University, where he teaches intellectual and international history. He is also an Affiliated Faculty member at Harvard Law School and an Affiliated Professor in Harvard's Department of Government. Among his publications are The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (2000), The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (2007), Foundations of Modern International Thought (2013), The History Manifesto (co-auth., 2014), and Civil Wars: A History in Ideas (2017).
Jennifer Pitts is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. She is author of A Turn to Empire: the rise of imperial liberalism in Britain and France (2005) and editor and translator of Alexis de Tocqueville: writings on empire and slavery (2001). She is currently completing a book,Boundaries of the International, that explores European debates over legal relations with extra-European societies during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. 

More information with OUP.