BOOK: Christopher R. ROSSI, Whiggish International Law [Studies in the History of International Law] (Leiden-New York: Brill Nijhoff, 2019). ISBN 978-90-04-37951-0, €99.00

(Source: Brill)

Brill has published a new book on the history of international law in the Americas during the end of the 19^th century-early 20^th century.

ABOUT THE BOOK

International law’s turn to history in the Americas receives invigorated refreshment with Christopher Rossi’s adaptation of the insightful and inter-disciplinary teachings of the English School and Cambridge contextualists to problems of hemispheric methodology and historiography. Rossi sheds new light on abridgments of history and the propensity to construct and legitimize whiggish understandings of international law based on simplified tropes of liberal and postcolonial treatments of the Monroe Doctrine. Central to his story is the retelling of the Monroe Doctrine by its supreme early twentieth century interlocutor, Elihu Root and other like-minded internationalists. Rossi’s revival of whiggish international law cautions against the contemporary tendency to re-read history with both eyes cast on the ideological present as a justification for misperceived historical sequencing.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Christopher R. Rossi teaches international law at the University of Iowa College of Law. He is the author ofEquity and International Law (Transnational), Broken Chain of Being: James Brown Scott and the Origins of Modern International Law (Kluwer), and Sovereignty and Territorial Temptation (Cambridge).

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Reading International Law’s Historiographic Turn in Latin America

Pages: 1–57

The Birth of the Root Doctrine

Pages: 58–92

Pan-Americanism and Rehabilitated Monroeism

Pages: 93–122

The Monroe Doctrine and the Standard of Civilization

Pages: 123–152

The Central American Court of Justice and the Monroe Doctrine

Pages: 153–191

Conclusion

Pages: 192–204

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