ABSTRACT
Writing in 1895, the positivist international lawyer Thomas J. Lawrence defined international law as “the rules which determine the conduct of the general body of civilized states in their dealings with one another”, and accordingly argued that “[t]he area within which the law of nations operates is supposed to coincide with the area of civilization”. 1 For the contemporary Cambridge international law professor John Westlake, “the general rules of international law apply in their fullness only to sovereign States like France or the United Kingdom”, and sovereignty is an attribute of European civilisation alone. 2 This was indeed the dominant view among the nineteenth-century international lawyers in general. As Anghie notes, “[o]nly European law counted as law. Non-European states were excluded from the realm of law, […] as a result of which the former were deprived of membership and the ability to assert any rights cognizable as legal”. 3 Thus, operating through the notions of sovereignty, standard of civilisation, social Darwinism, ethnicity and race, and so on, international law not only facilitated the colonisation of non-European societies as part of the “civilising mission” but also justified atrocities associated with the process.
