Introduction

This chapter describes and contests the common assumptions about nineteenth-century private international law intellectual history. Conventional historical accounts focus on broad schools of thought in private international law (PrIL), such as nationalism and internationalism, or personality and territoriality. By contrast, the central thesis of this book, described in this first chapter, is that internationalism was constructed differently depending on whether nineteenth-century internationalists took the state or the individual as the point of reference. This chapter argues that reading contemporary concepts and debates into nineteenth-century PrIL scholarship prevented us from engaging with the nuances and unique motivations of nineteenth-century PrIL theories. Instead, this introductory chapter outlines the contextual perspective adopted in this book’s intellectual historical account, which ultimately helps in recovering and reconstructing a relational internationalist perspective in nineteenth-century private international law legal thought.