Making the World Safe for Investment

"The book offers a pre-history of international investment law focusing on the time before 1959 and the ratification of the first bilateral investment treaty and the ICSID Convention. It introduces new primary archival material, including arbitral awards, diplomatic notes, and concession agreements, as well as scholarly writings pertaining to developments in these proceedings. The book develops the important role of concession agreements and their internationalisation for the making of international investment law, highlighting their private law character. It also offers an account of the underestimated role of 'general principles of law recognized by civilized nations' for the theoretical and practical consolidation of the norms in international investment law. On a theoretical level the book works with an account of law as jurisdictional practice and draws out the relationship between the claim to universality of international legal norms and the economic dominance and dependence created through this claim"--