Making the World Safe for Investment: The Protection of Foreign Property 1922–1959 (Cambridge Studies in International and Comparative Law, Series Number 178)

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.

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.