Introduction

This chapter discusses different historiographies of the protection of cultural heritage, which provides quite different perspectives and delimitations of this body of law, and finds that most or all of them contain important silences, or gaps, which inhibit a broader understanding of the legal treatment of such property. In 2005, the International Committee of the Red Cross published its monumental study "Customary International Humanitarian Law." The histories of a legal regime help determine the pedigree, the identity, and the content of its norms. The writing of the intrinsic history of international law the history of the law itself – re-form our consciousness of the identity, the functioning, and the potentiality of international law as law. The writing of the extrinsic history of international law – its relationship to the history of other social phenomena – reform our consciousness of the role of international law in the forming, re-forming, and re-making of international society.