Arbitrating Empire: United States Expansion and the Transformation of International Law

Arbitrating Empire offers a new history of the emergence of the United States as a global power-one shaped as much by attempts to insulate the US government from international legal scrutiny as it was by efforts to project influence across the globe. Drawing on extensive archival research in the United States, Mexico, Panama, and the United Kingdom, the book traces how thousands of dispossessed residents of US-annexed territories petitioned international Claims Commissions between the 1870s...