To the uttermost parts of the earth: legal imagination and international power, 1300–1870

Abstract

Martti Koskenniemi’s sweeping book on European legal thought is the longawaited complement to his seminal study, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations. That book detailed the rise of international law as a profession in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. This book traces multiple strands of European discourse about the law of nations across the preceding half millennium. Koskenniemi analyses the efforts of European legal writers to define property and sovereignty in relation to the projection of power beyond Europe. As reflected in the title, Koskenniemi insists that this book is not about the history of international law but instead a study of ‘legal imagination’. He defines legal imagination as the work of ‘ambitious men, mostly in Europe’ as they deployed ‘the legal vocabularies available to them’ to describe ‘the expansion of authority beyond their domestic world’ (1). Rather than revealing the origins of later legal doctrine, the goal is to illuminate ‘a form of institutional action that takes place in the context of controversy through the authoritative use of language’ (8). Legal imagination, Koskenniemi goes on to assert, was deeply rooted in specific political and institutional environments. Commentary on law always aimed at persuasion, so we must understand the aims and stakes of ongoing political conflicts if we are to grasp the development of legal discourse. Koskenniemi adapts Levi-Strauss’s term ‘bricolage’ to describe the process by which legal writers drew on materials from ‘the domestic legal system’ and built on their ‘domestic legal training’ when characterizing the juridical order beyond Europe (2, 9). The emphasis on specific formative contexts leads Koskenniemi to organize the book mainly around geographically centred traditions of legal writing. The first section contains chapters about the nature of ius gentium in late-medieval France, Spain and Italian city-states, followed by a chapter on Hugo Grotius. The next three sections focus successively on legal thought in France and its Atlantic empire, Britain and the empire, and the German states. The Conclusion and Epilogue follow. Running through the book is the theme of law’s protection of property. In an original and persuasive discussion of scholasticism in Spain, Koskenniemi shows that concerns with property pervaded the writings of Spanish political