In The Slave Trade and the Origins of International Human Rights Law, Stanford Law School Professor Jenny Martinez provides an unprecedented account of the death of the transatlantic slave trade and birth of the “original ‘crime against humanity’” (6). Martinez shows that the slave trade did not simply wither on the vines of nineteenth-century capitalism. Rather, the demise of the odious commerce was wrought by a deliberate combination of naval might and the force of law. Focusing primarily on the Courts of Mixed Commission for the Abolition of the Slave Trade and drawing upon extensive archival research, Martinez shows how an otherwise normal and lawful practice became all but universally prohibited over a matter of decades through a combination of law, persuasion, and raw power. In so doing, she offers enduring insights into the role of human rights activists, military force, and international judicial institutions in the progressive development of international law.

Martinez's account of international abolitionism appropriately begins on the waves, where the British Navy combined power and principle to give effect to abolitionist aims. The Napoleonic Wars presented the Royal Navy with the opportunity to expand Britain's 1807 ban on the slave trade beyond her own vessels, as enemy-flagged slave ships became fair game in time of war. But with Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo, Britain translated a unilateral experiment in humanitarian intervention into a multilateral initiative to abolish the slave trade. British abolitionists, who maintained a strong foothold in the House of Commons at the time of Napoleon's defeat, conditioned debt forgiveness and generous loans on foreign states' gradual abandonment of human traffic. In 1817, Spain and the Netherlands agreed to abandon the slave trade altogether. The same year, Portugal agreed to abandon its slave trade north of the Equator and to non-Portugese possessions. Through bilateral treaties with Great Britain, all three states agreed to submit disputes to adjudication by mixed commissions from which no appeal was permitted. In the span of forty-five years, more than 80,000 African captives were freed by these Courts.

Martinez ably demonstrates that the Courts of Mixed Commission were a judicial precursor to contemporary international human rights tribunals such as the International Criminal Court and ad hoc tribunals. In fact, she characterizes the mixed commissions as “the world's first international human rights courts” (150). This is no glib elision, though. Martinez is careful to consider the differences between the values systems in which nineteenth-century abolitionists labored and contemporary human rights lawyers operate; the role of the victim in judicial proceedings before the courts of mixed commission as opposed to before human rights tribunals today; and, perhaps the most thorny conceptual issue of all, the tension between natural law and positivism in contemporary international human rights law. The result is a book that is illuminating and provocative in equal parts. Martinez's writing is elegant, her narrative compelling, and her prose, at times, poetic. (“But the Myrmidon, a sprightly sloop, was fast enough to catch the swiftest slave ships” (4).)

Notwithstanding her indisputable expertise in the Courts of Mixed Commission, Martinez notes some uncertainty as to what, precisely, induced Portugal, the Netherlands, and Spain to agree to their jurisdiction despite the novelty of the institutions (35). The answer, perhaps, lies in the fact that they were not novel at all. The writings of classical international lawyers including Alberico Gentili, Hugo Grotius, and Emerich de Vattel, jurists with whom the architects of the Courts of Mixed Commission were undoubtedly familiar, contain examples of ancient and modern arbitrations that could have served as models for the new tribunals. This, however, is a very small qualm with a truly monumental work of scholarship. Martinez proves a riveting storyteller and a first-rate historian, attributes that become particularly clear in her discussion of the intractable difficulties Britain had in dealing with the United States and Brazil. She is to be congratulated for producing a work that will be of inestimable value to historians, lawyers, and policymakers alike.