Browse Hierarchy INRL6003: Law, Empires and Revolutions

What are the main legal events and processes of contemporary capitalism? And what can the history of modernity and imperialism teach us about them? This module is structured to provide students with an alternative history of international relations and of the legal aspects of the modern sovereign states system. It also provides students with alternative methodological skills from historical sociology to study the imbrication of history, international relations, and law. Each week takes a crucial event of today's world producing particular legal tensions and debates and revisits its significance through a historical counterpoint. This counterpoint, situated pre-1945, also represents a key moment of legal tension and debate in the history of international relations. For example, we look at the Arab Spring, struggles for human rights, TNCs, extraterritorial obligations, cross-border protests, migrants and refugees, and contrast these contemporary events with some of the following historical counterpoints: colonial trading companies, slave revolutions, capitulations, enclosures, the Treaties of Westphalia, the Ottoman empire. Through these unconventional comparisons, the module questions definitions of legal sovereignty and gives students the opportunity to discover different histories of the rise of capitalism and its expansion through legal processes. Fundamentally, the module questions the triptych shaping our international legal order - sovereignty-territory-jurisdiction - and explores how it is shaped by various forms of 'extraterritoriality' and other jurisdictional struggles for accumulation.