Stand: conditionality and sovereign inequality; Frame: history as shadow-box and the process if international legal reproduction; 1. The 'Abyssinia Crisis' and international law; 2. State colony, individual: the Longue Durée of international legal reproduction; 3. International legal reproduction and the League of Nations; 4. Empire des Nègres Blancs: the emergence of the Ethiopian empire as a subject of international law; 5. Interpellation and resistance: Ethiopia and the allure of the League; 6. Reconnecting the crisis; Lid: discipline, resistance and the process of international legal reproduction today; Sources.
Radical international legal history of the expansionary project of statehood and its role in generating profound distributional inequalities
Rose Parfitt is a Lecturer in Law at Kent Law School and a Senior Fellow at Melbourne Law School, where she holds a Discovery (DECRA) Award from the Australian Research Council. She also teaches regularly at Harvard Law School's Institute for Global Law and Policy (IGLP) workshops.
'What a wonderfully engaging and important book this is. Out of a
sophisticated, non-dogmatic Marxist perspective on international
law and history, Rose Parfitt develops an analysis of the
fundamental inequality of the international legal system by a
complex reading of the Italian invasion of Abyssinia in the 1930s
and the treatment of the matter by the Great Powers and the League
of Nations in Geneva. Including the perspective of the Ethiopians
themselves and situating the events in the larger history of
Western power and on military and diplomatic manoeuvres in the
'Orient', she constructs the most inspired - and inspiring -
postcolonial study of modern statehood and international law that I
have read.' Martti Koskenniemi, University of Helsinki
'Parfitt's The Process of International Legal Reproduction is
a major event in international legal scholarship - at the levels of
historical methodology, critical theory, and archival research. In
lucid and persuasive prose, Parfitt synthesizes the broadest range
of critical approaches, ranging from heterodox Marxism and
post-colonial theory to materialist linguistics and aesthetic
modernism - yielding a thoroughly original conception of 'modular'
historiography. Her case-studies, above all her magisterial
analysis of the 'Abyssinia Crisis' of the late 1930s, are based not
only on meticulous treatment of often previously unexamined
documents, but on a perspectival presentation of them in accordance
with her theoretical conception. The book is a monumental
achievement that should decisively shape the field for years to
come, compelling a rethinking of the basic categories of
international legal doctrine, historiography, diplomacy, and
resistance.' Nathaniel Berman, Rahel Varnhagen Professor of
International Affairs, Law, and Modern Culture and Religious
Studies, Brown University
'In this remarkable book, Rose Parfitt offers us an entirely new
way both to understand ostensibly familiar legal processes of state
formation, and to write the history of those processes.
International legal reproduction describes of the way existing
states usher new subjects of international law into being and
subject them to discipline, political, fiscal, and military.
Scanning half a millennium, Parfitt explores the terms new subjects
must meet even to qualify, and the prerogatives claimed by those
according them conditional 'sovereign' legitimacy. Multiple case
studies, including a detailed history of the 'Abyssinia Crisis' of
the 1930s, put demonstrative flesh on these macrohistorical bones.
This is an unapologetic call for revisionism in both the substance
and method not just of international law but also of legal history,
and a trenchant demonstration of the advantages that will accrue.'
Christopher Tomlins, Elizabeth Josselyn Boalt Professor of Law,
University of California, Berkeley
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