The history of law must be a history of ideas.

It must represent to us not merely what men have done and said, but what men have thought in bye­gone ages. Herein lie both the interest and the difficulty of [our subject]. We have to do with the thoughts of byegone ages, with thoughts which are not our natural thoughts, with thoughts that we can only recover and reconstruct by prolonged, circumspect, and diffident labour.

F.w. Maitland, �The Corporation Aggregate' (1893)^[1]

By elongating our visions to scan for patterns in the history of legal thought, over vaster expanses of time and space than we are ordinarily accustomed to considering, we are able to get a sense of those factors that gave rise to legal thought in the condition that it exists today. This requires attending to more than just les evenements of the past - as Fernand Braudel revealed by example, better than anyone else in the Annales School, in La Mediterranee (1949).^[2] It requires a greater willingness to stray from modernity than international law­yers, in particular, have typically been happy to show - if sometimes with good reason (even if this also goes some way to explaining why �international’ so often fails to live up to the lexical promise they want it to).

The argument is sometimes made that the field of international law ought to reconsider periodisation. For example, the eminent scholar Anne Orford, reflecting on the so-called �historical turn’ undertaken by some of her col­leagues, has confessed surprise at the persistence with which �contextualist

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critics of international legal scholarship [have] dismissed any “wide-ranging” studies of the movement of meaning across centuries as at best “genealogy” and at worst “anachronism”'. There was, in this, a paradox: that those very his­torians who were quickest to police the context of legal ideas also happened to be the least likely to undertake studies that might show the movement of ideas across them.

This collection has been put together, in part, to respond to this challenge. Taken together, the chapters make the case for showing greater attention to what if any intellectual characteristics were shared by legal thinkers as a group (and not only when they are to be found saying something �political' or �consti­tutionalist'). Focusing not only upon the applications of certain legal ideas, but also upon the motivations of individuals who conceived or adapted those ide­as, we begin the task of examining certain patterns of legal argumentation across millennia. What results from this perspective is a new way to discuss the practicality of distinguishing legal ideas from political ideas in history and his­toriography. �International law', as one of a number of intellectual strategies, begins to look very different in such a frame.

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