International Legal Histories of Precolonial Africa

Claims about Africa's past—whether in debates over territorial sovereignty or demands for reparations—continue to shape how international law is understood today. Yet despite the prominence of these debates, there remains remarkably little rigorous scholarship on Africa's international legal history prior to European colonization. This volume addresses that gap. Bringing together leading scholars of Africa from a range of disciplines, the book offers empirically rich case studies alongside a clear-eyed examination of the purposes, methods, and stakes of writing African international legal history. By scrutinizing European narratives about Africa, the volume reveals how modern international law came to marginalize African societies. But it also moves beyond critique, foregrounding African political orders and legal traditions on their own terms. The chapters draw on diverse archives, sources, and languages to illuminate the continent's wide array of legal and institutional frameworks for managing interpolity relations. Across discussions of political authority, the regulation of slavery and the slave trade, human rights, and sustainability, contributors map out new ways of recovering Africa's international legal histories before colonization. By bringing together “contributionist,” “critical,” and “contextualist” approaches, International Legal Histories of Precolonial Africa adopts an unusually ecumenical posture. It reconstitutes the archives, concepts, and methods available to scholars and opens fresh avenues for understanding Africa's place in the international legal order—both past and present. This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read on Oxford Academic and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.