Preface

Comprehension of the development of legal thought over time is necessary for any historical, philosophical, practical, or theoretical enquiry into the subject today. Perspective is everything.

The recurring theme of the collection is empire - in all its diversity of mean­ing. The range of the collection is thousands of years. The mean epoch lies within the medieval period, but the median periodisation, providing the most important correlation with the area of most interest to scholars in the history and theory of international law and empire, is the early modern period. Several chapters reach across several centuries; others are framed in a way that identi­fies continuities and changes across a long period of time. All chapters remain sensitive to context in consideration of the characteristics of legal thought, and in particular, how legal thought changes in relation to new contexts, espe­cially colonial contexts, or instances of expansion and interaction with other polities. As a result, these essays, collectively, aim to shift the frame of refer­ence in the history of international law in important - and needful - ways.

Each chapter provides an examination of the possibilities and impossibili­ties of approaching the history of legal thought as separate to the history of political thought. Some ideas and institutions were both legal and political at the same time, it emerges.

Fruits of two intensive workshops at the University of Cambridge (with thanks to Downing College and the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law) on the back of months and months of facilitating new connections between scholars across disciplines, sub-disciplines, and specialisations, this book has been compiled to present a number of searching attempts to illuminate conti­nuities in the history of legal thought across the longue duree. The extent to which it will succeed in this endeavour, however, depends entirely upon the fancies of the academic readership we are able to attract. To you, the reader, for selecting this volume, I offer my warm thanks. To go with that, I ask only that you try to acquaint yourself with all of the chapters, rather than the one or two that may be relevant to your own research or coursework. Each of these chap­ters are introduced individually in the first opening chapter of the volume - and this comes next.

It took four years to bring this project to fruition, after first conceiving of the idea back in 2016. I am most grateful to Randall Lesaffer and Wendel Scholma, neither of whom I ever expected (in the first place, at least) to have the pleas­ure to work with at Brill. That is because I was originally encouraged to publish this volume by Oxford University Press. However, after the proposal was pitched, reviewed, and accepted, and subsequently the chapters were collated and submitted in accordance with their demands, the volume was suddenly dropped by the publishers. The explanation I received from the series editors and subject editors was that my volume was not �commercially feasible' be­cause, as lead editor, I lacked the �massive name recognition' of the academics in international law they ordinarily publish.

My experience with Brill has been very different. I think it's terrific that some of the contributors to this book - like the editor - are a bit obscure. That's because the peer reviewers of this book were asked to express concern about the quality of the chapters instead of the popularity of their authors. The results that follow speak for themselves.

I am proud to have sought constantly throughout this project to accommo­date and create linkages between graduate students, early-career scholars, mid-career scholars, later-career scholars, retired scholars, unaffiliated schol­ars, and scholars from unconventional backgrounds. I am glad to see so many of them in the table of contents of this volume. And I am humbled that the good people at Brill agree with me that projects like this are the best way to ensure that conversations about law and empire continue to take place omnidirectionally across generations - and epochs! - rather than unidirec­tionally, from the tenured Professor at the top, to his or her listeners below, all of whom thinking in the same register, on the same topics, about the same kinds of thing.

This collection has come together in what feels like a volatile moment for the field. At the intersection of legal history, international law, global history, and intellectual history, a quarrelsome culture of communication prevails among established scholars. Disagreements over language, methodology, and source material, over an artificial conflict they have created between anachro­nism and contextualism, and over a simplistic distinction they have drawn between theory and practice are becoming excessively bitter. Early career­scholars and graduate students are finding it difficult to participate in conver­sations about law and empire without first making clear to the right people where they stand on debates which are not of their making. The peer review process exacerbates this problem. By forcing those scholars who tend to be the most desperate to publish (in order to break into an increasingly precarious profession) to cite the work of this or that kind of scholarship in perfunctorily praiseworthy footnotes and needlessly long prolegomena, we make our work appear more esoteric, and/or less imaginative, than it really is. As the editor of this volume, I have therefore encouraged my authors not to take this route, and I am thrilled that none of our peer reviewers has asked any of us to do other­wise. Deference to scholarship should come naturally, and if it does not come naturally, one should never force it. Likewise, controversies among a certain generation of scholars should never automatically concern those of subse­quent generations unless they are absolutely necessary for the comprehension of meaning. Actually, this is something that careful research into the history of legal thought over centuries has the power to reveal with great force.

Edward Cavanagh