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.