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Webb Yackee, Jason --- "The first investor-state arbitration? The Suez Canal dispute of 1864 and some reflections on the historiography of international investment law" [2018] ELECD 125; in Schill, W. Stephan; Tams, J. Christian; Hofmann, Rainer (eds), "International Investment Law and History" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2018) 70

Book Title: International Investment Law and History

Editor(s): Schill, W. Stephan; Tams, J. Christian; Hofmann, Rainer

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN: 9781786439956

Section: Chapter 3

Section Title: The first investor-state arbitration? The Suez Canal dispute of 1864 and some reflections on the historiography of international investment law

Author(s): Webb Yackee, Jason

Number of pages: 32

Abstract/Description:

The use of history in international investment law (IIL) scholarship is a work in progress. IIL scholarship already relies on history to a significant extent, but IIL scholarship can also ‘do’ history better than it currently does. IIL scholarship’s use of history sometimes seems methodologically unselfconscious and incomplete. To improve, historically minded IIL scholars need to have a better sense of the issues, both epistemological and practical, that professional historians wrestle with, and they need to be more comfortable engaging in the sine qua non of the modern historical method – the use of primary-source (and typically archival) materials to illuminate both how IIL was understood and experienced in earlier eras and how those earlier conceptions and applications of IIL may or may not remain relevant today.