A roundtable and book launch: Whose Law? Asia, Empire, and the Making of Global Legal Order

This roundtable brings two recent works into conversation around the long history of law, the nature of legal order, empire, and international order.

Fernanda Pirie's The Rule of Laws traces four thousand years of the world's legal traditions, challenging the assumption that European law was ever the natural or inevitable global standard.

The Cambridge History of International Law: Asia, edited by Maria Adele Carrai and Surabhi Ranganathan, explores the histories of international law in Asia, examining contested languages of sovereignty, the legacies of empire, and Asia's own traditions of inter-polity order.

Together, the authors will discuss how legal concepts travelled, were imposed, resisted, and remade across imperial and postcolonial worlds, and what these histories reveal about the foundations of international order today.

The discussion will be followed by an open audience Q&A.

After the roundtable, guests are invited to an aperitivo reception celebrating the publication of The Cambridge History of International Law: Asia, Volume 2. Dinner will follow by invitation only.

This event was possible thanks to the support of the IECL Fund, Oxford.