This roundtable brings two recent works into conversation about the long history of law, the meaning and function of legal order, the history of empire, and international order.
Fernanda Pirie’s The Rule of Laws traces four thousand years of the world’s legal traditions, challenging the assumption that European law was ever the natural or inevitable global standard.
The Cambridge History of International Law: Asia, edited by Maria Adele Carrai and Surabhi Ranganathan, examines the histories of international law in Asia—the contested languages of sovereignty, the legacies of empire, and Asia’s own traditions of interpolity order.
Together, the authors ask how legal concepts travelled, were imposed, were resisted, and were remade across imperial and postcolonial worlds, and what those histories mean for how we understand international order today.
An open exchange with the audience will follow. The roundtable will be followed by a reception celebrating the publication of The Cambridge History of International Law: Asia, Volume 2.
The event brings together scholars from law, history, and international relations and is supported by the IECL Fund, Oxford.
