New over at the University of Chicago Law Review Online: Race and the History of International Investment Law, by Felipe Ford Cole, Sharswood Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School:
Over the last decade, new contributions to the history of international investment law (IIL) have begun to redefine the field’s origins. Where a progressive narrative of steadily improving legal responses to the travails of moving and protecting investments around the world once stood, a more sober story of the continuities of gunboat diplomacy, resort to force, and asymmetries of power is emerging. The scholars behind the new histories of IIL, drawing on earlier critiques of similarly Whiggish narratives in international law, aim to establish a new, more nuanced relation between IIL and its history. Many challenges lie ahead in the venture into the massive tangle of previously underexplored historical events, sources, and theories. No challenge will prove as fraught as reconciling the contemporary normative ends of IIL with those behind its emergence in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. For most IIL scholars and practitioners today, the normative goal of IIL is the peaceful expansion of investment for the benefit of societies and investors alike. For the jurists and diplomats that shaped the core IIL doctrines in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, the goal was securing the property of investors from “civilized” races in a world of “uncivilized” races. These incongruent ends are hardly unusual for a modern body of law, but in the case of IIL, the full influence of theories of racial hierarchy is not entirely understood.–Dan Ernst
