Towards Comparative International Legal History?

Abstract The great rejuvenation known by the history of international law and, in its wake, the recent engagement with its national dimensions begs the question of whether they and comparative international law are providing the hitherto missing building blocks for the often invoked yet never realized emergence of comparative international legal history. Section I examines the recent revival of study of the national dimension of the history of international law with reference to three main categories: national histories of international law of great Western powers; of semi-peripheral Western countries and of non-Western countries. Section II then examines some of the normative, sociological, methodological and historiographical arguments in favor of the complementary use of the national lens in researching the history of international law from the perspective of its epistemological completeness but also some of its possible dark sides. Section III explores the potential development of comparative international legal history as an embryonic field by retracing the intellectual development of comparative international law in a historical perspective and examining its most recent revival. The article concludes by arguing that existing scholarship already offers the building blocks for the materialization of comparative international legal history as an interdisciplinary field and by illustrating some of its features.