Traditional histories of international law describe it as the invention of European nation-states who sought to maintain peace among themselves. Such accounts often assume that international law provides a model for justice and equity, even if powerful states have sometimes ignored it.
In the last twenty years, critical histories of international law have undermined such Eurocentric accounts by showing how the discipline emerged from imperial encounters. Pitts’ Boundaries of the International offers a new contribution to this literature by focusing on the mostly overlooked transitional period between the late seventeenth and late nineteenth centuries. Pitts shows that during this period, the emerging discipline of international law embraced a “parochial universalism” (6). European commenters on the law of nations ignored the system’s imperial origins and declared its values universal. Yet, at the same time, they denied that these laws governed Europe’s colonial policies. Non-Europeans might be admitted to the society of...