Session Abstract
Lawyers have historically played a central role in shaping American laws; and by the beginning of the 20th century, they became part of transnational networks with the idea of influencing laws and legal institutions abroad. Within a decade, they were joined by a new professional group equally engaged in shaping American and international legal development: American philanthropists and social scientists.
By analyzing these transnational networks, this panel reveals how American lawyers, philanthropists, and social scientists combined to shape a wide variety of socio-legal projects in the first half of the twentieth century. The three papers—covering the growth of the transatlantic international law profession, the highly internationalized reform discourse in the Chinese Republic after the fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1911, and the introduction of apartheid in South Africa – all demonstrate the vital role of American legal concepts and actors in the construction of national policies and the international community.
The first paper, “‘To Internationalize International Law’: American Philanthropic Initiatives and Transatlantic Legal Thought, 1906-1921,” by Benjamin Coates, explains how the Carnegie Endowment of International Peace (CEIP) changed the nature of international lawyers’ conversations on international law in the early twentieth century. The second paper, “Twisted Borrowings and Failed Exports: The Chinese Republic and the Early Structure of American Transnational Legal Networks,” written by Jed Kroncke, details American and Chinese lawyers’ relationship in the same time period, and how many Chinese attempts to learn from the American legal experience were as warped by the presumption of export embedded in these transnational networks as were American attempts to influence Chinese legal development. The third paper, “Philanthropists, Social Scientists, and Laws on Race Relations in the United States, South Africa, and Germany,” by Maribel Morey, describes the role a community of American philanthropists and social scientists played in determining the course of public policies on race in the U.S., Germany, and South Africa in the 1930s.
In each of these three cases, Americans sought to use transnational networks to spread their ideas about proper national and international order. They necessarily entered into dialogue with the intended recipients of their ideas in China, South Africa, and Europe. In so doing, these American attempts to create a world of legal order in their own image led to complicated and often contraindicated outcomes: the international society that surfaced in the interwar period, the Chinese legal institutions, and policy solutions to the international problem of White-Black relations that developed in the 1930s (and particularly the Nuremberg laws) departed in important and unexpected ways from the best-laid plans of American actors.
This panel contributes to the conference’s themes of “Communities and Networks” and opens a conversation on the extent to which Americans in the twentieth century were successfully able to create a global empire of legal order crafted in their own image. Moreover, it will also discuss how—by looking at transnational networks of socio-legal actors—historians can expose the specific national nature of international legal projects and the international scope of seemingly national legal projects.