Recent times have witnessed a proliferation of new academic contributions to the study of the history of international law. Many of them have avowedly professed to countervail the Eurocentric orientation that had largely dominated historical writing on international law since the disciplines of History and Law became the subjects of professional academic study at universities in the late nineteenth century.Footnote ¹ Genin’s prize-winning book brings his reader right back, instead, to the European international associational roots of the modern professional and academic origins of international law.Footnote ² As in Martti Koskenniemi’s The Gentle Civilizer of Nations,Footnote ³ these are geographically and temporally situated in Ghent around the time of the establishment of La Revue de droit international et de la législation comparée (RDILC) in 1869 and the foundation of the Institut de droit international (IDI) in 1873. However, unlike in Koskenniemi’s broader transnational historical inquiry into ‘a narrative of the mainstream as a story about its cosmopolitan sensibilities and political projects’,Footnote ⁴ these disciplinary galvanizing events are the departure point in Genin’s book for mapping the professional and academic emergence of international law specifically in Belgium until the outbreak of the First World War.

Genin’s study of the professional milieu of Belgian international lawyers as ‘actors of the development of international law, considered as a phenomenon emerging from within a transnational space, the autonomy of which becomes affirmed in the last third of the nineteenth century’,Footnote ⁵ is divided into three chronologically ordered chapters and preceded by a long introduction devoted to questions on historiography and socio-historical methodology. The volume is rounded off with a concluding chapter where its author summarizes the main results of his ‘contribution to the history of international relations of Belgium’.Footnote ⁶ The Belgian case, in contrast to mainstream international law historiography, which is still dominated by great-powers’ epoch-making characterizations,Footnote ⁷ and often periodized accordingly,Footnote ⁸ offers an interesting example of a small, neutral, economically-advanced country which, like others with similar characteristics (Switzerland being an obvious example), has carved out a remarkable role for itself in the historical development of international law.

The book’s main contribution to the sociological history of international law lies in that it provides more historical texture, albeit hagiographically at times, to the lives, works, and times of the Belgian (white) ‘men of 1873’Footnote ⁹ and their epigones in their own cultural, intellectual, academic, and national political context throughout the last third of what Eric Hobsbawm called the ‘long nineteenth century’ (1789–1914).Footnote ¹⁰ In this sense, Genin’s book partakes in the stricter attention given to the contextual historical method that has characterized the ‘turn’ to the history of international law across several disciplines in recent years.Footnote ¹¹ Indeed, the book offers a contextualized tissue of intertwined stories spanning in time from the first ‘associations for the progress of the social sciences’, which served as the matrix for the launching of the RDILC and the foundation of the IDI, through The Hague Peace Conferences of 1899 and 1907, and finally to the outbreak of the Second World War. The themes that feature in its contents include a study of the introduction of international law as an academic discipline in Belgian universities; the role played by noted Belgian jurists, such as Alphonse Rivier, Ernest Nys, and Edouard Descamps, in the polemics surrounding the Belgian Congo; and the ups and downs of the IDI, concluding with a reference to the financial support it began to receive from the Carnegie Endowment in the late 1900s. Also of note, insofar as it allows the reader to gaze beyond the confines of Europe into processes of juridical renovation fostered by Western imperialism in Asia, is Genin’s analysis of the ‘origins of the exotic network’Footnote ¹² of Gustave Rolin-Jaequemyns in Siam, where he stayed from 1892–1901. Genin’s analysis of what he characterizes as the polemical symbolism gained by the 1899 Hague Peace Conference in the works of Belgian international lawyers on account of their divergences with Belgian diplomats at a time when the office of the international legal advisor was yet to be incorporated into the foreign service is similarly interesting. Although, chronologically speaking, the present volume ends with the outbreak of the First World War, there is a second, separate, prize-winning book by the same author following up on the story of the Belgian international law community from 1914 to the origins of the Second World War.Footnote ¹³

The author, a historian by craft, has relied on weaving together the multiple narratives traversing his book from ‘sources in archival manuscripts’ scattered throughout Belgium, France, Italy, Switzerland, and The Netherlands,Footnote ¹⁴ the study of which, he claims, has been ‘systematically neglected’ in a field which has not ‘truly inspired the writings of professional historians yet’.Footnote ¹⁵ Indeed, one can hope that the example of Genin’s book will attract other international law archive-digging professional historians to join the interdisciplinary, eclectic field of research in the history of international law. This is a field currently cultivated by a heterogeneous group of scholars made up of international lawyers occasionally transmuted into amateur historians; legal historians sporadically struggling to present themselves as savvy international lawyers; historians of international political thought sometimes posing as all the aforementioned and, occasionally too, professional historians who, as noted by Andrew Fitzmaurice, are increasingly ‘engaging with the subject as part of their turn to the international dimension of history’.Footnote ¹⁶ While each of these epistemological communities is contributing valuable works and methodological insights to the history of international law, there is still ample room for historians interested in mining long neglected archival sources and applying an array of socio-legal historical methods to produce novel and more contextualized perspectives on the historical development of international law.

The outcome of Genin’s historical research is, ultimately, an interesting collective portrait in motion of what the author terms an ‘epistemological community’ of ‘transnational character, linked to the national Belgian framework, but appertaining to an international community (that of Western international lawyers), and presenting a multi-positional character’.Footnote ¹⁷ Genin methodologically approaches his ‘Belgian laboratory of international law’ through the lenses of ‘a study of a non-formalized network’Footnote ¹⁸ relying on concepts belonging to this sociological field of studies such as ‘intermediarity’,Footnote ¹⁹ which stresses the vector-role of key persons (Rolin-Jaequemyns in the Belgian case) in its development, or the role played by ‘l’esprit de corps’ in defining a particular network’s distinguishing features. This socio-historical methodological approach, which borders on prosopography, is a welcome addition to a field where this methodology has been little attempted. Nonetheless, one should mention the existence of historical international legal studies tackling similar ‘epistemological communities’, including some involved in some of the darkest episodes in the history of international law like those involving Nazi and FascistFootnote ²⁰ or Francoist international lawyers.Footnote ²¹ Moreover, the application of this methodological approach would certainty benefit from the historiographical (re)turn to the cultivation of intellectual biography in a historical context of notable international law scholars,Footnote ²² who often also perform in their careers (like the ‘multi-positioned’ dramatis personae of Genin’s book) the interchangeable roles of domestic lawyers and legal advisors to states, international institutions, or corporations.

Decolonization and later, globalization, and in their wake post-colonial historiographies and the rise of ‘global history’, largely account for the contemporary tendency among international law historians to write histories of international law about non-European peoples and from non-European perspectives. This new globalist historiographical orientationFootnote ²³ has largely succeeded in re-including traditionally excluded groups from non-Western countries – across Asia, Africa, and the Middle East – and the non-European Western semi-periphery – Latin-America, and the United States – in the study of the writing and practice of international law in a historical perspective. However, the recent salutary renaissance experienced by critical, well-contextualized, and documented accounts of the hitherto, too often prone to nationalist overtones genre of national histories of international law in Europe, is also to be welcomed.Footnote ²⁴

This shows that there is also ample scope for the writing of histories of international law in Europe beyond the homogenizing perspective of a totalizing ‘European tradition of international law’, which had often been constructed around the limited set of historical events, particular international law writers, and the specific experiences and circumstances of Western European great powers with an underestimation or mere exclusion of the rest. The revamped cultivation of national histories of international law has much to reveal about aspirations and achievements, but also about the blind spots and dark sides in different international law epistemological communities across different places in Europe (and elsewhere) throughout different periods in international legal history. The multiple terrae incognitae of the comparative history of international law in Europe (and elsewhere) are in need of more socio-historical explorations like Genin’s, which goes a long way to show that the universal inhabits the local as much as the local inhabits the universal.