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Western governments, companies, economists and lawyers established the international legal order now known as international investment law to protect foreign property from a redistribution of wealth through domestic law making. This book offers a pre-history of these legal arrangements, focusing on the time before 1959 and the ratification of the first bilateral investment treaty and the ICSID Convention. It introduces new archival material, such as arbitral awards, diplomatic notes and concession agreements, as well as scholarly writings pertaining to developments in these proceedings. These materials are systematised into a coherent argument on the protection of foreign property. The book develops the important role of concession agreements and their internationalisation for the making of international investment law, thereby insisting on the private law character of the foundations of the field. In doing so it displays the analytic force of viewing law as jurisdictional practice, rather than as a system of norms.
List of contents
1. Making the world safe for investment; 2. The Palestine railway arbitration 1922; 3. The Lena Goldfields arbitration 1930; 4. The Sheikh of Abu Dhabi arbitration 1951; 5. The Abs-Shawcross draft convention 1959; 6. Conclusions: the world is safe for investment.
About the author
Andrea Leiter is an Assistant Professor at the Amsterdam Center for International Law at the University of Amsterdam, whose research for this book has been funded by a competitive Fellowship awarded by the Austrian Academy of Sciences. She is a former visiting researcher at the Institute of Global Law and Policy at Harvard Law School.
Summary
A fresh account of how the international legal regime for protecting foreign investment came into being, based on primary archival material. Andrea Leiter then draws on this history to explain why this regime works the way in currently does, which advantages some and makes others invisible.
Foreword
A full history of the development of the field of international investment law from 1922 to 1959 – and its consequences.
