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2022 U. Chi. L. Rev. Online 1 (2022)

handle is hein.journals/uchidial90 and id is 1 raw text is: 03/02/22 U. Chi. L. Rev. Online *1 RACE AND THE HISTORY OF INTERNATIONAL INVESTMENT LAW Felipe Ford Cole1 Introduction Over the last decade, new contributions to the history of international investment law (IIL) have begun to redefine the field's origins. Where a progressive narrative of steadily improving legal responses to the travails of moving and protecting investments around the world once stood, a more sober story of the continuities of gunboat diplomacy, resort to force, and asymmetries of power is emerging. The scholars behind the new histories of IL, drawing on earlier critiques of similarly Whiggish narratives in international law, aim to establish a new, more nuanced relation between IIL and its history. Many challenges lie ahead in the venture into the massive tangle of previously underexplored historical events, sources, and theories. No challenge will prove as fraught as reconciling the contemporary normative ends of IIL with those behind its emergence in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. For most IIL scholars and practitioners today, the normative goal of IIL is the peaceful expansion of investment for the benefit of societies and investors alike. For the jurists and diplomats that shaped the core IIL doctrines in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, the goal was securing the property of investors from civilized races in a world of uncivilized races. These incongruent ends are hardly unusual for a modern body of law, but in the case of IIL, the full influence of theories of racial hierarchy is not entirely understood. This Essay provides a roadmap for this project. First, I introduce the two prevailing narratives of the history of IIL and the stakes involved in the field's history. In Part II, I lay out some of the methodological steps necessary to resituate race more firmly in the history of IIL. Part III presents a brief case study of race in the Venezuela crisis of 1902, a historical watershed in the emergence of IIL, employing the methodological suggestions explored in Part II. I. Past and Present in International Investment Law IIL's relationship to history has been, until recently, ambivalent. Though IIL scholars and practitioners rely on history to substantiate their arguments and descriptions, the history simply complements the 1 Felipe Ford Cole is a Sharswood Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School. He thanks Jay Butler, Melissa Murray, Guy Charles, Gina- Gail Fletcher, Craig Konnoth, and The University of Chicago Law Review Online editors for their helpful comments and feedback.

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