Notably, three historians have written the two books on international law under review here. They represent a welcome change from the works by lawyers writing in the last two decades on the history of international law. These writings of the last two decades are said to have inaugurated the so-called ‘turn to history’. Originally, C.H. Alexandrowicz, based in India in 1951–1961, offered, if you will, the first moment in the turn to the history of the law of nations and empire in that he studied East Asia, Indochina and South Asia.1 Evidently, historians and lawyers affiliated to post-colonial and post-structuralist traditions have been doubtless cross pollinating since the decolonization of Asia and Africa.2