Cambridge History Of Rights: Volume 5, The Twentieth And Twenty-First Centuries

The concept of a right, and the idea of human rights, were familiar abstractions on the brink of the twentieth century. But the history of political mobilization since shows that human rights had a transformative capacity in that century that no prior age had demonstrated. Through the twentieth century, human rights became institutionalized internationally in laws, movements, and organizations that transcended state-based citizenship and governance – which irrevocably changed the politics around them. Rights continued to evolve as the imperial world order transitioned to a postcolonial world of sovereign states as a primary form of political organization. Through twenty-six essays from experts around the world demonstrating how this period is historically distinctive, volume five of The Cambridge History of Rights is a comprehensive and authoritative reference for the history of rights in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Samuel Moyn is Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University. He is the author of several books, most recently Liberalism against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times.

Meredith Terretta is Professor of History at the University of Ottawa. Her research on rights, international law, and decolonization appears in Human Rights Quarterly and Law and History Review, among others.