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Overview
In A Scrap of Paper, Isabel V. Hull compares wartime decision making in Germany, Great Britain, and France, weighing the impact of legal considerations in each. She demonstrates how differences in state structures and legal traditions shaped the way the three belligerents fought the war.
Hull focuses on seven cases: Belgian neutrality, the land war in the west, the occupation of enemy territory, the blockade, unrestricted submarine warfare, the introduction of new weaponry, and reprisals. A Scrap of Paper reconstructs the debates over military decision-making and clarifies the role law played—where it constrained action, where it was manipulated, where it was ignored, and how it developed in combat—in each case. A Scrap of Paper is a passionate defense of the role that the law must play to govern interstate relations in both peace and war.
Isabel V. Hull is John Stambaugh Professor of History at Cornell University. She is the author of Absolute Destruction and Sexuality, State and Civil Society in Germany, 1700–1815.
Table of Contents
1. Prologue: What We Have Forgotten 2. Belgian Neutrality 3 The "Belgian Atrocities" and the Laws of War on Land 4. Occupation and the Treatment of Enemy Civilians 5. Great Britain and the Blockade 6. Breaking and Making International Law: The Blockade, 1915–1918 7. Germany and New Weapons: Submarines, Zeppelins, Poison Gas, Flamethrowers 8. Unrestricted Submarine Warfare 9. Reprisals: Prisoners of War and Allied Aerial Bombardment 10. ConclusionBibliography Index
What People are Saying About This
Sir Hew Strachan
Over the last decade, with wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the laws of armed conflict have become matters of popular and public interest. Despite the growth of international humanitarian law, much of the law with which we still operate dates from the fifteen years just before the First World War and was applied within it. A Scrap of Paper is the first book to pay sustained attention to the subject of international law in the First World War since 1920. It is not only a timely book, it is an overdue one, and its impact on the study of the war will be important and game-changing. Isabel V. Hull has the linguistic range and scholarly tools to tackle the subject in the truly comparative fashion that its complexity demands.
Martti Koskenniemi
Isabel V. Hull's passionate narrative of the role of international law in the decision-making processes in Berlin and London during the First World War opens a strikingly original perspective on the consciousness of the wartime actors. This was a war waged also by legal arguments. In the end, the inability and unwillingness of Imperial Germany to defend its case in legal terms crucially undermined its war effort. This is not only superb history, but also the most powerful defense of the role of law in international crisis that I have read, and as such is of obvious contemporary relevance.
