The Right of Conquest: The Acquisition of Territory by Force in International Law and Practice

The Right of Conquest: The Acquisition of Territory by Force in International Law and Practice. By Sharon Korman. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press/Clarendon Press, 1996. Pp. ix, 323. Index. $72.

This is a very well done book in a familiar, if puzzling, genre. Originally written as a doctoral dissertation at Oxford, Korman's book well illustrates the strengths and weaknesses of much contemporary international law research in what seems, at least to these American eyes, the dominant British style. Korman reviews the history of the "right of conquest" in international law from the midseventeenth to the late twentieth century. The book is full of fascinating historical tidbits from which Korman pulls an often-tentative conclusion about the state of the law regarding title acquired through military conquest in various periods. Her overall story is one of progress: International society used to have a clear rule authorizing title to territory through conquest. In this century, under the combined assault of self-determination doctrine and the prohibition on the use of force, we have moved away from the traditional rule.

Korman's book is particularly good of its type. Unusual among works mapping the movement of twentieth-century international law away from a "traditional" doctrinal order, Korman's historical story is complex, particularly for the period before 1900. She is attentive to countertendencies and surveys a rather wide selection of brief case studies. In particular, Korman is careful to differentiate the treatment of conquest in the colonial encounter from that of conquest within Europe. Unlike many international law historians who look back beyond the First World War, she is interested in the attitudes of statesmen as well as scholars. As a result, her history of the rights of conquest in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has a refreshingly contemporary feeling, perhaps reflecting her immersion in the literature of international relations and diplomatic history as well as international law.

Perhaps most intriguing, Korman organizes her history around an ambivalence about precisely the progress she narrates. Although it is common in other fields to structure historical work that maps a move into modernity against a counternarrative of fall from virtue, this is a much less familiar attitude among conventional international legal scholars who are usually more committed to the utopian possibilities of a fully...