Introduction. An American Project

The introduction sets the historiographical and political stakes of narrating and analyzing Scott’s campaign for the Spanish origin of international law, drawing on current methodological discussions and the role of the concept of equality in our political discourse. It also explains the relation of the book with previous scholarship on Scott and literature on the rise of international legal networks in the Americas in the early twentieth century. Moreover, it elaborates on the reasons for the primarily descriptive style the text adopts and on certain related choices of language. The introduction ends with an outline of the structure of the book and of the individual chapters.