Clio@Themis (Jun 2020)
Comment et pourquoi écrire l’histoire du droit international ? Le cas de l’abolition de l’esclavage
Abstract
Over the last decade, there have been debates opposing international lawyers on the one hand, and historians and legal historians on the other, on how and why to write the history of international law. The objective of this article is to participate in these debates through a case study : that of the abolition of slavery and its inclusion in the historiography of international law. The history of slavery and in particular that of its abolition has aroused renewed interest within the discipline of international law. Some international lawyers have turned to history in order to draw lessons from the successful ways in which international law ought to have abolished the transatlantic slave trade in the nineteenth century. Others have examined the history of the codification of slavery in international law in the light of European colonial imperialism. It will emerge from our analysis that international lawyers’ renewed interest in the history of slavery is rooted in the present, in the sense that they want to better understand the past in order to better act in the present. This presentism is not a problem in itself ; it becomes a problem only when the recourse to history ceases to be critical and serves merely to justify – and thus to perpetuate –existing professional projects and international legal institutions.
