Public International Law/History of International Law/Nineteenth Century





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A. Introduction
Ideas stemming from the nineteenth century and ideas about the nineteenth century are firmly engrained in the collective memory of modern and contemporary international lawyers, and the developments that took place during the nineteenth century continue to shape the material conditions of global wealth and power distribution. When international lawyers refer to the nineteenth century, they usually mean the 'long' nineteenth century. To mark the beginning of this long nineteenth cenurty, one can refer to the revolutions in the United States of America (1776), France (1789), and Haiti (1791). The end of the long nineteenth century is usually determined either with the beginning of the First World War in 1914 or with the October Revolution and the revolutionary Mexican Constitution in 1917. Among the many developments that took place within the long nineteenth century and that have shaped the modern world, this chapter focuses on five developments that were particularly pertinent to international law: First, the revolutions that mark both the beginning and the end of the 'long' nineteenth century; second, the ‘first globalization’, i.e. the ‘expansion’ of the subject-matters regulated by international law as a response to increasing global networks of communication, commerce, and domination and the emergence of something that from a present-day perspective can be recognized as an ‘internationalist ethos’, including all the ambiguities that this ethos still carries today; third, the formalisation of colonial empire; fourth, the establishment of an international system based on state sovereignty; and, fifth, the emergence of international law as an academic discipline that we can recognize as similar to its present-day counterpart and the establishment of a 'science of international law'.

Further Readings

 * Source I
 * Source II

Conclusion

 * Summary I
 * Summary II