The Law of Nations at the Naval Academy in Copenhagen around 1800: the Lectures of Christian Krohg

Abstract

Recent scholarship has no doubt contributed to a better understanding of the law of nature and nations by no longer regarding it exclusively as a topic developed in a limited number of classical works forming a single identifiable tradition, and, further, by identifying it as a subject of academic teaching established in the late seventeenth century and ending well into the nineteenth. As a consequence, the law of nature and nations should not only be measured by its theoretical coherence or originality, but also be understood by the way it was received, appropriated and transmitted in various institutional, legal and political contexts. Moving forward from this angle, it is, however, important to realize that we still know comparatively little about the workings of this tradition of moral and legal thinking and that we – in order to gain a better understanding of the matter – will need a more comprehensive mapping of the territory. The scope of this chapter is to contribute to such a mapping, by introducing a DanishNorwegian textbook that has remained virtually unknown until today. The book in question is Forsøg til en Ledetraad ved Forelesninger over FolkeRetten (An Attempted Guide to Lectures on the Law of Nations), published in Copenhagen in 1803; its author is Christian Krohg (1777– 1828) and the lectures on which the textbook is based were held at the Royal Danish Naval Academy in 1801 and 1802. To introduce a textbook is, in many ways, a different enterprise from presenting an innovative theoretical work where one can highlight its contribution to an ongoing debate or focus on the way it makes established ways of thinking obsolete. A textbook will always remain anchored in a tradition that must be accounted for in order to understand its content. Before turning its attention to Krohg’s lectures, this chapter will therefore begin with an attempt to sketch a contextual background against which they must be understood. Two contexts are particularly important here: 1) the way the law of nations was treated as an academic subject at the University of Copenhagen; and 2) the