Abstract

Shifting Relations between Trade Law and Business Practice in the League of Nations

This paper examines the interaction between public and private rule-making in early multilateral trade law, under the League of Nations. It will focus on key areas of public trade law that helped business leaders create new normative structures to organize their own activity – namely contract arbitration, patents, and commercial representation. In these areas, League of Nations – working in tandem with the International Chamber of Commerce – sponsored formal intergovernmental treaties that enshrined business actors’ normative authority. This process of private ordering had already begun in the nineteenth century in an ad-hoc way but became more systematic and integrated under the League of Nations and ICC. This paper will engage with the bourgeoning scholarship on the construction of transnational legal orders as a key facet of globalization, past and present. This paper is part of a forthcoming monograph, Order and Rivalry: Rewriting the Rules of International Trade. It traces the formation and development of multilateral trade structures in the aftermath of the First World War in response to the marginalization of Europe in the world economy, the use of private commerce as a tool of military power and the collapse of empires across Central and Eastern Europe. Focusing on the League of Nations, the book shows that this institution’s legacy was not to initiate a linear forward march towards today’s World Trade Organization, but rather to frame an open-ended and conflictual process of experimentation that is still ongoing.