Reviews

Boundaries of the International: Law and Empire by Jennifer Pitts

jakeclf's review

4.0

Similar to Benton and Ross’s edited volume, Boundaries of the International by Jennifer Pitts is another useful book for the exploration of empire and law. Boundaries of the International is a study of the ideological and political work on the laws of nations and international law during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries within and outside of Europe. Principally, Pitts claims that international law aspired to universal legitimacy (2). The European conceptualizers of international law sought to universalize its impact. They did not think of their international laws a regarding simply the relations of European states, but rather they believed their European-born international laws applied to rest of the globe as well. Chapter 2 addresses the Ottoman Empire’s place as consistently interacting with European states while possessing a meaningful amount of European land, however the Ottoman empire was not conceived of as “a full participant in the European legal community” (22). Chapter 3 discusses Vattel’s “conceptualization of the international sphere as a space inhabited by free and equal states conceived” of as national communities (24). In Chapter 4, Pitts argues that in the late eighteenth century, new critical approaches to the question of the scope of the European-born law of nations and the nature of legal relations between European and non-European states emerged from the work of Vattel. I googled Vattel and now I better understand what Pitts is talking about. Chapter 5 explores the reception of Vattel’s work in Britain, and Chapter 6 argues that although international law was born exclusively in Europe, European legal and political thinkers believed that European-born international law was “destined” to be authoritative to all (25).