Jan Martin Lemnitzer. Power, Law and the End of Privateering

In this excellent monograph, Jan Martin Lemnitzer offers a study of the first global norms of maritime war, created in the mid-nineteenth century. Seeking to rescue these norms from the condescension of posterity, Lemnitzer presents the regime of maritime law as a transformative instance of global governance that marked the universalization of the European Law of Nations, successfully regulated naval warfare for 60 years until its collapse in World War I, and proved foundational for present-day international law. He also casts the creation of this regime as a product of a pioneering act of quasi-instantaneous law-making with universal ambition, involving a multilateral treaty agreed upon at a major international congress to which non-signatory states were invited to accede. Arranged chronologically and divided into seven chapters, the book first explores the origins of the Declaration of Paris, which was signed by seven powers (Britain, France, Russia, Prussia, Austria, Sardinia-Piedmont, and the Ottoman Empire) at the end of the Crimean War in 1856 and stipulated rules governing the conduct of naval war. The book then traces discussions of this declaration and the issue of maritime law during the next 15 years, from the initial American diplomatic response and a second follow-up U.S. initiative in 1859, which inspired a truly international campaign by activists in the city-state of Bremen, to the U.S. Civil War, to the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, and the Franco-German War of 1870–1871.

Declaration · International law · Law of war · Peace treaty · Political science · Power (physics) · Spanish Civil War · State (computer science) · Treaty · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies