Colonialism, World War I, and the League of Nations

Nineteenth-century international law developed hand in hand with European colonial expansion, and much of its doctrine reflected and reinforced a hierarchical worldview embodied in the so-called "standard of civilization." Under this framework, articulated by jurists such as the Swiss-born international lawyer Johann Caspar Bluntschli and later systematized in works including James Lorimer's 1883 Institutes of the Law of Nations, full legal personality and the protections of the law of nations were treated as applicable chiefly among self-described "civilized" states—principally the powers of Europe and the Americas—while non-European polities in Africa, Asia, and elsewhere were often classified as merely "barbarous" or "savage," a categorization that legal scholars of the period used to justify unequal treaties, extraterritorial jurisdiction (as in the "capitulations" imposed on the Ottoman Empire, China, and Japan), and outright colonial annexation without the consent international law otherwise required between sovereign equals.