Repurposing Constitutional Vocabularies
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Repurposing Constitutional Vocabularies
ARTICLE

Intro: Creatively Negotiated Transformations

Throughout the 19th century, constitutional language traveled rapidly across imperial and colonial worlds. Terms such as “law”, “constitution”, “rights”, and “representation” appeared with increasing frequency in places far removed from their original European genealogies.

Yet this circulation did not produce uniform meanings or predictable outcomes. Instead, constitutional vocabularies entered local debates shaped by inherited legal traditions, political institutions, and moral frameworks. The result was not simple imitation, but a series of creative negotiations over what law was supposed to do, whom it was meant to bind, and how authority should be constrained or justified.

The three articles in this colloquy explore those negotiations from distinct but complementary vantage points. They show that constitutionalism did not arrive outside Europe as a finished blueprint. Rather, it functioned as a flexible repertoire, one that could be deployed to confront arbitrariness, ward off colonial pressure, reorganize governance, or reaffirm existing sources of legitimacy. What unites these cases is not a shared institutional outcome, but a shared problem: how to render power accountable without dissolving the social and moral orders that sustained political life.

Reimagined to Regulate and Legitimize

In “Mirza Malkom Khan and the Politics of Legal Reform in 19th Century Iran”, Sara Zanotta examines how written law emerged as a response to uncertainty and discretionary rule. In this setting, legal reform was framed less as a rupture with inherited norms than as a means of stabilizing governance and making authority predictable. Codification promised to transform power by subjecting it to publicly articulated rules, while still allowing older legal and ethical frameworks to inform the content of those rules. Codified law here appears not as a foreign imposition, but as a remedy for arbitrariness, grounded in the belief that justice requires form, procedure, and general applicability. This approach highlights how demands for codification could arise from within existing traditions even as they drew on globally circulating concepts.

Kongsatja Suwanapech’s contribution “The Constitutional Petition That Changed Everything in Siam (Or Did It?)” turns to constitutional language as a site of cultural translation and friction. It shows how shared vocabularies could mask fundamentally different assumptions about political order. Constitutional terms that sounded familiar to European ears were mobilized locally for strategic purposes, often disconnected from popular sovereignty or democratic participation. In this case, constitutionalism functioned less as a mechanism for dispersing power than as a resource for defending autonomy and redefining legitimacy under imperial scrutiny. The encounter reveals that constitutional dialogue is rarely symmetrical: identical words can carry incompatible meanings depending on whether authority is imagined as mechanical, moral, or developmental.

The third text, “Constitution as Method in 1880s Egypt” by Mujeeb Khan, approaches constitutionalism as a method rather than a doctrine. Instead of asking whether constitutional ideas were imported or indigenous, it examines what those ideas were made to accomplish in practice. By focusing on procedures (consultation, constraint, administration, and execution), it shows how it was possible to integrate constitutional language into long-standing legal traditions and institutional settings. In this context, the constitution is not primarily a declaration of rights or a symbolic concession, but a regulatory framework that disciplines authority through rules, councils, and enforceable limits. Comparison across regions underscores that such methodological uses of constitutionalism were neither unique nor derivative but emerged from parallel efforts to govern change.

Mirza Malkom Khan
King Chulalongkorn
Muḥammad ʿAbduh

The actors who played a part in shaping these transformations were both anchored in local traditions and affected by global influences. An Iranian writer and diplomat who had studied in France ended up publishing an oppositional newspaper in London, inspired in equal parts by examples from Europe and from Muslim countries. A group of Siamese princes submitted a constitution drafted in London to their king, whose reply refuted the universality of European standards. In Egypt, a reformist scholar and later grand mufti conceptualized constitutionalism within Islamic legal tradition, blending the foreign with the local.

All three cases challenge linear narratives of constitutional diffusion. They suggest that constitutionalism’s global history is best understood not as a story about adoption of or resistance against European ideas, but as one of transformation. Law, in these contexts, was not merely borrowed; it was repurposed. And it was through this process of repurposing, which was deeply shaped by local institutions, intellectual traditions, and political pressures, that constitutional ideas acquired their force.

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Mujeeb Khan/ant.e team, "Creatively Negotiated Transformations," ant.e, May 2026, https://ante-blog.univie.ac.at/article/intro-creatively-negotiated-transformations/
Repurposing Constitutional Vocabularies
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Repurposing Constitutional Vocabularies
ARTICLE

Mirza Malkom Khan and the Politics of Legal Reform in 19th Century Iran

In the 19th century, Iran witnessed the emergence of intellectual debates on the necessity of reforming the country’s administration, including its legal system. In a context where the empire’s independence was at risk, and local governors and notables arbitrarily exercised their power, a potential solution was found in qānun, interpreted as written and secular laws.

The Qajar empire had a legal and judicial system, though non-codified. While the existence of ʿorf (custom) has been a subject of scholarly debate,1 the ʿolama presided over shariʿa courts, especially dealing with matters of personal status. Moreover, the shah could sit in judgement over disputes, guided by the principle of what was best for the country.2 This degree of arbitrariness and uncertainty sparked a debate on legal reforms with clear political implications.

Originally, the debate was not exclusively conceived as a way to democratise the country, but rather as a tool to counter decentralising attitudes of local governors and powers, and to more effectively resist the Russian and British encroachment on the country. As a result, it drew inspiration from legal developments both in Europe and in other parts of the Muslim world, such as the Ottoman empire and Egypt, as well as local conditions. One of the initiators of this debate was the Iranian Armenian Mirza Malkom Khan, author of the pamphlet “Ketābcheh-ye Ghaibi” (Occult Booklet) or “Daftar-e Tanzimāt” (Book of Reforms), composed in 1858.

Writer and diplomat Mirza Malkom Khan (1834–1908) is considered one of the fathers of the Iranian Constitutional Revolution. Image credit: Originally uploaded by BehnamFarid, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Who was Mirza Malkom Khan?

Born in 1834 in New Julfa to an Armenian Christian family that later converted to Islam, Mirza Malkom Khan’s upbringing was shaped by his father’s close contact with Qajar officialdom. This allowed Malkom to study in France at the government’s expense. At the age of 18, he returned to Iran and worked first at the polytechnic school Dār al-Fonun as a lecturer and translator for foreign instructors, then as the personal interpreter to the sovereign and the first telegraph operator in Iran.

After writing “Ketābcheh-ye Ghaibi” and establishing the para-masonic lodge farāmushkhāneh (House of Oblivion), he left Iran, first moving to Baghdad, and then working as a diplomat in Egypt and Istanbul. In the Ottoman capital, he established contacts with Ottoman and Iranian reformists. After holding government positions in Iran for a few years, he obtained a diplomatic post in London in 1874 and remained there for two decades. During this time, his relations with the Qajar government became progressively conflictual and culminated with the publication of the oppositional newspaper Qānun in 1890, which was banned in Iran.3

Introducing the Concept of Qānun

It has been estimated that, during his life, Malkom probably wrote about 200 treatises,4 which were circulated among a small number of courtiers, princes, leading officials, and literates in Iran. In his writings, he considered qānun, interpreted as codified laws, as a necessary step to improve the conditions of the country.

Malkom first discussed this concept in his first writing, “Ketābcheh-ye Ghaibi” or “Daftar-e Tanzimāt”, composed anonymously in 1858 and transmitted to the shah via his trusted confidant Mirzā Jaʿfar Khān Moshir al-Dowleh. The pamphlet introduced the Ottoman concept of tanzimāt, literally meaning reorganisation, and aspired to similar developments in Iran. Most pertinently, Malkom also reinterpreted the general concept of qānun existing in Persian as “principle”5 and defined it as “any ordinance issued by the government, tending to the general welfare of the community and equally incumbent upon all its members”6, following the example of Ottoman legal language.

While often associated with secularity in a Western sense, in Malkom’s view, qānun was not in opposition to shariʿa. Probably out of political astuteness, Malkom never overtly deplored Islamic law, but rather conceived of it as a potential source of inspiration for the content of newly written laws.

Mirza Malkom Khan’s oppositional newspaper Qānun was banned in Iran, but found its way into the hands of politicians, merchants, and Iranian pilgrims passing through Istanbul. Image credit: میرزا ملکم خان, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Codifying Laws

Malkom’s writings not only discussed the necessity of laws but provided texts for new norms, ranging from proposals for a new institutional system to examples of codes. In his pamphlet, while not suggesting a constitutional monarchy just yet, he proposed 23 separate laws and articles that, taken together, formed a sort of basic law. However, their content appeared quite contradictory, showing a partial integration of the concept of the separation of powers, especially between the shah and the legislative chamber, called majles-e tanzimāt (chamber of reform) and tasked with the codification of laws (art. 11). This body was to compile all relevant precepts from shariʿa and the state, and draft a bill of rights, as well as criminal, military, and administrative codes, and regulations for the affairs of the government.

Actual proposals for these codes were provided in “Daftar-e qānun” (Book of Law), published in the early 1880s. Here, Malkom wrote a bill of rights that also protected against illegal imprisonment, as well as an administrative code for civil servants. Most importantly, he proposed a criminal code that was to be valid, for the first time, in the whole country (art. 1) and established the principle of nulla poena sine lege (art. 9), marking an important step towards ending arbitrariness.

Europe as an Example?

The impact of Malkom’s writings became especially visible in the 1890s, when, following increasing tensions with the Iranian government, he established a newspaper in London, whose title itself again stressed his objective: Qānun. Often regarded as “the most important and influential” publication of the reign of Naser ad-Din Shah7, Qānun was disseminated on a large geographical scale, reaching Istanbul and secretly imported into Iran.8 While data on its exact readership are not available, Qānun and its reprint were spread among politicians, merchants, and even Iranian pilgrims passing through Istanbul.9 It was not a traditional newspaper: attention to current news was scarce, and Malkom’s main concern was what he perceived to be a lack of laws.10

» Our books and the chests of our scholars are full of good laws «

The articles in the newspaper were indicative of his approach to legal reform in Iran and, in particular, three main characteristics of this process. First, having laws was necessary to avoid the destruction and oppressions that occurred in a state of arbitrariness, and therefore, every human being should ask for qānun.11 Second, qānun and shariʿa were not incompatible or separated. In his view, “our books and the chests of our scholars are full of good laws”, but they were not implemented.12

Third, European countries were not the sole source of inspiration. Certainly, since “Daftar-e Tanzimāt”, Malkom had considered European countries as examples and asked that their principles of order be applied and established in Iran without delay, either by invention or by imitation.13 However, he considered legal principles to be universally equal and also took examples from Muslim countries, stressing that in the Ottoman empire, Egypt, and among the Turkmen, “everyone knows what their rights and duties are”.14 Still, his choice to stress non-European examples appears to have been an astute, practical way to push Iran to join these countries as a response to internal and external threats.

  1. Nobuaki Kondo, Islamic Law and Society in Iran. A Social History of Qajar Tehran (Routledge, 2017), 2-4. ↩︎
  2. Ervand Abrahamian, “Oriental Despotism: The Case of Qajar Iran”, International Journal of Middle East Studies 5, no. 1 (1974), 25. ↩︎
  3. M.M. Tabātabāʿi, Majmuʻhā-ye āsār-e Mirzā Malkom Khān (Ketābkhāneh Dānesh, 1327/1948), b. ↩︎
  4. Abdul-Hadi Hairi, “The Idea of Constitutionalism in Persian Literature prior to the 1906 Revolution,” in Akten des VII. Kongresses für Arabistik und Islamwissenschaft, ed. Albert Dietrich (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht,1976), 199. ↩︎
  5. Hamid Algar, Mirza Malkum Khan: A Study in the History of Iranian Modernism (University of California Press, 1973), 29. ↩︎
  6. Tabātabāʿi, Malkom Khān, 14. ↩︎
  7. Shaul Bakhash, Iran: Monarchy, Bureaucracy and Reform under the Qajars: 1858-1896 (Ithaca Press, 1978), 396. ↩︎
  8. Ḥāfeẓ Farmānfarmāʾiān, Khāterāt-e Siyāsi Mirzā ʿAli Khān Amin al-Dowleh (Moʿasseseh-ye Enteshārāt-e Amir Kabir, 1370/1991), 139. ↩︎
  9. Sara Zanotta, “Long-Distance Constitutionalists: Trans-Imperial Mobility and Cross-Border Strategies of the Iranian Constitutional Movement (1850s-1910s)” (PhD diss., University of Pavia, 2025), 146-149; 178-179. ↩︎
  10. Qānun, n. 1, 1. ↩︎
  11. Qānun, n. 2, 2-3. ↩︎
  12. Qānun, n. 1, 2. ↩︎
  13. Tabātabāʿi, Malkom Khān, 13. ↩︎
  14. Qānun, n. 1, 1. ↩︎
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Sara Zanotta, "Mirza Malkom Khan and the Politics of Legal Reform in 19th Century Iran," ant.e, May 2026, https://ante-blog.univie.ac.at/article/mirza-malkom-khan-and-the-politics-of-legal-reform-in-19th-century-iran/
Forced and Forged Bridges of International Law
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Forced and Forged Bridges of International Law
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The Tehran School and International Law in Early 20th Century Iran

On 19 December 1899, the Tehran School of Political Science (Madrasa-ye ʿolum-e siāsi) opened its doors to the first cohort of students. Mostly of nobility backgrounds, these students were enrolled in a three-year program equivalent to an undergraduate degree. The program included various courses on history, geography, economics, foreign languages, and international law, among others.

The founder and first director of the school was Hassan Moshir-al-Molk Pirnia (1871-1935), the son of the minister of foreign affairs of Persia and a law graduate from Moscow. For him, the creation of a specialized school was aimed at training a skillful diplomatic corps for the ministry of foreign affairs. On the eve of the Constitutional Revolution (1906-11), the need to modernize and keep pace with a Eurocentric global order had augmented domestic demand for legal expertise, placing legalist projects at the center of intra-elite struggles.

The founder and first director of the Tehran School of Political Science, Hassan Pirnia. Source: Morgan Shuster, The Strangling of Persia, New York 1912, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

In Persia, as in other peripheral states, importing European legal standards and expertise was seen as essential to maintaining political independence and gaining access to the family of nations. International law was pivotal to the School’s European-style curriculum and pedagogy. Not only did the teaching of international law precede the teaching of other branches of law but also some of the earliest works published by the School’s lecturers focused on international law.

The Rise of Modernist Lawyer-Politicians

The School of Political Science was the third-oldest institution of modern education in Iran, preceded only by Dār al-fonun (polytechnic college) and Madrasa-ye nezāmi (military college) founded, respectively, in 1851 and 1885. Compared to European-style institutions of legal education in Egypt and the Ottoman Empire, this school was rather a latecomer in the Middle East. Its creation had transpired as a historical product of decades-long social class and power reconfigurations in the highest echelons of governance in Iran. Over the 19th century, gradual expansion of European-style bureaucracy resulted in the rise of a stratum of intelligentsia. Unlike traditional nobility, members of this social stratum derived their social distinction from the mixture of their patrician backgrounds with European credentials.

Coming from this stratum of intelligentsia, many leading Iranian lawyer-politicians of the early 20th century, such as Pirnia, Mohammad Mossadegh (1882-1967) and Ahmad Matine-Daftary (1897-1971) studied and taught at the School of Political Science and the School of Law (Madrasa-ye hoquq) created in 1919. With most disciplines of social sciences still in their embryonic stages of development in Iran, law had notably grown in importance within the reformist and modernist aura of post-revolutionary Persia. Echoing this legalist spirit, Mohammad-Ali Foroughi (1877-1942), one of the school’s lecturers, asserted that law was the “science of the polis” and the “most indispensable of all sciences and techniques”.1

» It was in the pedagogical fabric of this institution that Iranian jurists began to reimagine international law as an object of scholarly reflection, and as an element of the institution-building and state modernization projects they undertook in the next decades. «

For most of the 19th century, the flow of cultural imports from the Ottoman and Russian empires played a vital role in shaping Iranian perceptions of modernity. By the turn of the century, with increasing direct contact between Iran and Europe, this influence had gradually dwindled. With France and French-speaking cantons of Switzerland as their study destinations, most Iranian lawyer-politicians were inspired by Francophone legal cultures, which they believed counterbalanced decades-long Russo-British supremacy in Persia. This French influence expanded over time. By the 1920s, the School of Political Science and the School of Law had developed into Francophone institutions in their structure, curriculum, and pedagogy.

Earliest Scholarly Works of International Law

By the end of the 19th century, Persia, relegated to a “semi-civilized” status and largely excluded from the European-dominated community of states, began to increasingly participate in major multilateral diplomatic conferences. Only a few months before the School was founded, the Persian government had sent a delegation to the Hague Peace Conference of 1899. Against this backdrop, Pirnia dedicated the first seminar of the nascent institution to public international law. His lectures were compiled and published as the first academic textbook of international law in Iran.2 The content and structure of this book matched Friedrich Martens’ Traité de droit international (published in 1882-83),3 suggesting that Pirnia’s previous education in Russia had informed his choice of relevant sources.

The first academic textbook of international law in Iran: cover page of Pirnia’s Hoquq-e beyn-al-melal (1901).

Despite its Russian lineage, Pirnia’s textbook was replete with references to French terms and sources, reflecting the vital position of French-language scholarship for Pirnia’s institution-building project. This growing move towards French legal scholarship was exemplified by another Persian-language textbook of international law published a decade later by Mohammad Mazaher (known as Sadiq Hazrat).4 A lecturer of history and international law courses, he had completed his secondary education in Istanbul, followed by a law degree in Paris. The book, which appears to be a translation of a French handbook for students of the diplomatic service,5 was published in various editions over the next decades.

Besides these textbooks, this period saw the publication of other scholarly works on international law. In 1908, Hossein Motamen-al-Molk Pirnia (1875-1948), Hassan Pirnia’s younger brother and a law graduate from Paris, published the first Persian-language treaty collection.6 A lecturer of economics, he compiled the texts of treaties concluded between Persia and (non-)European states between the 17th and early 20th centuries, offering a uniform terminology for Persian equivalents of foreign terms.

In 1914, Mohammad Mossadegh, a lecturer of procedural law who had obtained his doctorate in law from Neuchâtel, published a treatise on the status of capitulations in Persia.7 Building on the end of extraterritoriality in Japan (1899) and the Ottoman Empire (1914), he argued that “a state which fails to make foreign nationals subject to its domestic jurisdiction […] may not deserve to rule over its own nationals.”8 In the quest for possible pathways to the abolition of capitulations in Iran, Mossadegh favored European-style legal codification and judicial modernization. In his view, these were not incompatible with Islamic law, which had to be adapted to the “exigencies of the time and the interests of mankind”.9

The Lasting Legacies of an Elite Institution

In the educational reforms of the 1920s, the School of Political Science merged with the School of Law, later forming the Faculty of Law, Political Science, and Economics of the University of Tehran (1934). These structural developments transformed small institutions tasked with training government bureaucrats into a single institution of mass education. An elite institution in its origins, the School of Political Science was an integral part of the complex history of the engagement of Iranian lawyer-politicians with state modernization and global diplomacy in the pre-WWI and interwar periods. It was in the pedagogical fabric of this institution that Iranian jurists began to reimagine international law as an object of scholarly reflection, and as an element of the institution-building and state modernization projects they undertook in the next decades.

A group of professors and students of the Faculty of Law of the University of Tehran in the academic year 1934-35. Source: Yearbook of the Faculty of Law, 1935, p. 108.

A series of judicial reforms introduced in 1911 by Hassan Pirnia, then minister of justice, was followed by European-style legal codification in the 1920s and culminated in the abolition of capitulations in 1928. Following decades of exclusion from the international community, Iran joined the League of Nations in 1920. Leveraging the possibilities that the League system offered, Iran increasingly used the language of international law to express its historical grievances vis-à-vis imperial powers, including in its oil dispute with Britain in 1932-33. This generation of legalism, born in the intellectual aura of the School of Political Science and the School of Law, later outlived the political disruptions following the Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran in August 1941.

In the immediate post-WWII years, a coalition of prominent jurists of the interwar generation, notably Mossadegh, and younger jurists in the elite establishment breathed life into a new wave of (international) legalism. Many of these young figures, such as Ali Shayegan (1903-1981) and Karim Sanjabi (1905-1995), had completed part of their education at the Faculty of Law or its predecessor institutions. Relying on an anti-colonial legalist rhetoric to push for “resource sovereignty”, this wave of legalism culminated in the early-1950s oil nationalization policy led by Mossadegh’s government. This era of the ascendancy of liberal legalism in Iran arguably only came to an end following Mossadegh’s overthrow by a U.S.-backed coup d’état in August 1953.

  1. Mohammad-Ali Foroughi, Hoquq-e asāsi yā ādāb-e mashrutiyat-e dowal [Constitutional Law or the Elements of Constitutional Governments] (Madrasa-ye ʿolum-e siāsi, 1907), 2. ↩︎
  2. Hassan Moshir-al-Molk, Hoquq-e Beyn al-Melal [International Law] (Dār-al-tebā’e, 1901). ↩︎
  3. Mohsen Nikbin, “On the Origins of the Earliest Lecture on International Law in Persia”, Jus Gentium – Journal of International Legal History, vol. V, issue 1 (2020): 179. ↩︎
  4. Mohammad Mazaher (Sadiq Hazrat), Hoquq-e beyn-al-melal-e omumi [Public International Law] (1912). ↩︎
  5. René Foignet, Manuel élémentaire de droit international public, à l’usage des étudiants en droit et des candidats aux carrières diplomatique et consulaire (6th ed., Librairie nouvelle de droit et de jurisprudence Arthur Rousseau, 1908). ↩︎
  6. Hossein Motamen-ol-Molk, Majmu’e-ye mo’āhedāt-e dowlat-e ’alliye Irān bā doval-e khārejeh [Recueil des traités de l’Empire persan avec les pays étrangèrs] (Matba’e-ye Pharos, 1908). ↩︎
  7. Mohammad Mossadegh, Kāpitulāsion va Irān [Capitulations and Iran] (Matba’e-ye Barādarān-e Bāqerzādeh, 1914). ↩︎
  8. Ibid. 53. ↩︎
  9. Ibid. 52. ↩︎

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Soheil Ghasemi, “The Tehran School and International Law in Early 20th Century Iran”, ant.e, January 2026, https://ante-blog.univie.ac.at/article/the-tehran-school-and-international-law-in-early-20th-century-iran/
Forced and Forged Bridges of International Law
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Forced and Forged Bridges of International Law
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Comment: International Law in Three Histories

Yes, states had made agreements with, and warred against, each other for ages, yet in the decades between the 1870s and the 1930s, industrial-era politics and globally connecting capitalism drove people around the world closer together. Treaties and wars took on new and different forms. In the context of accelerating connections, an emergent framework of “international law” promised to rationalize relations among nations. While framed by its early promoters as law “among nations”, Euro-American approaches to international trade and treaties were hardly global in the mid-19th century. Rather, “international law” largely referred to the norms shared by the industrialized countries of Europe and the Americas, norms that were at times imposed on countries deemed outside the civilizational pale.

Toward Occidental Orientations

These blog posts on Japan, Korea, and Iran show the ways in which something called “international law” spread beyond its Euro-American roots. They reveal how an emerging corpus of law that pretended to a kind of internationalism became increasingly global. Giorgio Fabio Colombo’s detailed accounting of an 1872 dispute over coerced Chinese laborers on a Peruvian ship moored in Japan, which was ultimately arbitrated in Russia, reveals the undeniably global dimensions of the early 1870s. Nearly concurrently, the Japanese empire, with other global empires of the world in mind, imposed an unequal treaty on Korea, as described by Ki-Won Hong. Japanese imperialism showed that all kinds of countries could exploit the inequalities baked into international law.

The HMS Iron Duke, the vessel to which Chinese coerced laborers fled from the María Luz. Unknown author, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Then, a few decades later, elites in Tehran used international law as the departure point for establishing a law-based political order – as described by Soheil Ghasemi. By the turn of the 20th century, international law had become both an object of study by people the world over and a collection of practices from London to Lima, from St. Petersburgh to Seoul.

Early Euro-American adopters of international law used it to connect commerce and diplomacy to rules that reflected an emergent and increasingly cohering group of practices. This provoked a curious dynamic as international law stretched across the planet, sometimes by force. From the 1850s, diplomats and reformers in China, Korea, and Japan rushed to translate Euro-American legal texts from Johann Kaspar Bluntschli to Henry Wheaton into Asian languages.

» It was the potentially leveling power of international law, wedded to domestic reform, that accelerated its adoption. «

Around the same time, reformers in Tehran shifted their focus from existing regional modes of international relations to European forms, particularly French models. In Japan, Korea, Persia, and elsewhere, the cross-pollination of new ideas prompted students to study abroad in Holland, France, Germany, England, and the United States. The international movement of legal advisers from these same countries diffused a range of legal knowledge. All of this gave rise to the establishment of schools, such as the Tehran School of Political Science. By the 19th century’s end, law schools had become sites for incubating political leaders of nation-states the world over.

While the dynamic of engagement, inquiry, and then adoption unfolded both within and at the geographic margins of an Atlantic-centered world, the processes of international law’s spread reflected internal demands in many countries. For their own reasons, from shoring up sovereignty to suppressing internal dissidents, domestic reformers, thinkers, and politicians inside and outside of Europe and the Americas enthusiastically adapted newly emergent approaches to law among nations.

Legal Equality’s Elusive Promise

The three blog posts, and the papers on which they were originally based,1 generally read international law, or its spread, as a moment of possibility, if not positivity. Colombo writes: “[T]he Japan-Peru controversy was the first instance in which an Asian country successfully invoked the instruments of international law to defend itself in the community of civilized nations.” In Ki-Won Hong’s text, we see the complaint that the Meiji government “approached international law pragmatically, using it to bolster its regional ambitions, while selectively ignoring its [international law’s] egalitarian ideals.” Hong writes as if an egalitarian impulse had been widely adopted elsewhere only to be forsaken by Japanese imperialists.

Japanese and Korean diplomats at the commemorative feast for the Treaty of Kangwha. Painting by Ahn Jungsik (1861-1919), public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

In other words, the tone across the posts is generally positive. Colombo notes that Meiji politicos in Japan believed that by using international law to best Peru, they could raise their status among the world’s leading nations. As described by Hong, Chosŏn reformers hoped they could contain their erstwhile Japanese neighbor with international law. And Ghasemi describes how Hassan Mošīr-al-Molk Pirnia used international law as the scholarly medium for introducing modern politics to Persia. Yet despite the enthusiastic embrace of international law in each case, it was an embrace under the shadow of unequal treaties, the threat of war, or existential dread.

The promise of equal sovereignty under something called “the Westphalian System” had always been a mirage. Ghasemi notes how Tehran elites knew both the sweet and the sour of international law, as “Iran increasingly used the language of international law” – which had in the past been leveraged against Persia – “to express its historical grievances vis-à-vis imperial powers”. As self-described “pawns” in Britain and Russia’s Great Game, Persians had grudgingly resigned themselves to the system of capitulations since the 1820s. The prospects for international law serving as a leveler among nations were decidedly mixed.

» These are not histories of the weak using international law to contain the strong. «

These are not histories of the weak using international law to contain the strong. Tellingly, the Meiji government’s success in the María Luz incident was not replicable in cases when the Japanese government’s antagonist was the more formidable Great Britain. Japanese litigants fared somewhat poorly in other notorious maritime cases of the 1870s and 1880s, such as the sinking of the Japanese naval vessel Chishima in a collision with the British-flagged Ravenna, and the deaths by drowning of nearly all the Japanese passengers of a British-flagged ship, the Normanton, while the largely European crew survived. By 1910, the Japanese empire had absorbed a strategically situated and militarily weak Korea. In the case of the School of Political Science and School of Law, if one ends its history in the 1920s, then it reads as a triumph of rational constitutionalism. Yet in the longer sweep of Iranian history, the success of the school’s brand of restraint and adherence to the rule of law did not survive internal and external pressures.

And Still …

Thinking about these cases and the context in which they operated, both domestic and international, one sees the interweaving of a range of interests, extending inward and outward. Foreign pressure and imperialism certainly drove international law’s spread. But it was the potentially leveling power of international law, wedded to domestic reform, that accelerated its adoption. Savvy operators around the world, including in Korea, Japan, and Iran, exploited opportunities in the space between idealism and pragmatic statecraft to achieve goals that included convincing other nations of their civility, imposing modern imperialism on a neighbor, and crafting a constitutional nation-state.

Countries once at the margins of international law began to make it global, shaping it in the process. These histories of Japan, Korea, and Iran show that “law among nations” was not just imposed, but demanded, which made it integral to globalizing systems of nation-states and capital.

  1. Papers given at the online symposium “Legal Orders under Pressure: Non-Western Experiences of Legal Transformations in the 19th and early 20th Centuries” of the Max Planck Research Group Translations & Transitions, 7–9 December 2022, organised by the Chair for Globalisation and Legal Pluralism, Faculty of Law, University of Vienna, Austria, together with the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Theory, Frankfurt am Main, Germany. ↩︎

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Darryl Flaherty, “Comment: International Law in Three Histories”, ant.e, January 2026, https://ante-blog.univie.ac.at/article/comment-international-law-in-three-histories/