Hosted by King’s History Department and the King’s Law and History hub, the symposium puzzled how to approach the history of international law across multiple indigenous and non-indigenous polities in the Pacific from the sixteenth to twentieth centuries.
Driving the overall research project and the workshop at King’s itself is the multi-volume Cambridge University Press series on the history of international law, specifically in this case the Cambridge History of International Law: Oceania, circa 1500-1920. The contributing authors to this volume were able to benefit from testing their draft chapters and arguments with a variety of experts drawn from diverse disciplines in the room and online.
The Pacific is a place where these inter-polity legalities and their intensive crossings and entanglements can be seen en masse, not only in New Zealand but throughout a vast ‘sea of islands’ such as Sāmoa, Tonga and Hawai’i. This has implications for constitutional law and practices in the twenty-first century and seeing the Pacific as a key contributor in making inter-polity legalities. Focusing on interactions between political communities - whether indigenous polities themselves sharing and contesting space or indigenous polities and the normative regimes and assumptions of strangers – allows us to approach histories of ‘international law’ from different angles of vision, illustrating the making and re-making of inter-polity laws across time.– Visiting Professor at King’s Department of History, Dr Mark Hickford
Dr Hickford, formerly Legal advisor to the New Zealand Prime Minister and a Pro-Vice-Chancellor of Te Herenga Waka - Victoria University of Wellington, is currently a barrister at Thorndon Chambers, Wellington, New Zealand and visiting fellow at the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights at the Faculty of Law, University of Oxford as well as being a visiting professor at King’s.
Scholars in person and from across several time zones took part in the symposium, including academics from Hawaii, Fiji, Aotearoa-New Zealand, Tonga, Australia and the United Kingdom. The workshop considered whether and how common norms and legal regimes emerged in the Pacific, the vital role of the Pacific in crafting inter-polity legalities, and the inheritances these interactions left into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Held in the Council Room at King’s, the symposium was convened to assist authors contributing to the Cambridge History of International Law volume part addressing the Pacific from circa 1500 until 1920. Participants attending included Hohee Cho (University of Oxford), Megan Donaldson (University College London), Sarah Down (University of Cambridge and the Ngāi Tahu Research Centre, University of Canterbury), Andrew Fitzmaurice (Queen Mary University London), Emma Gattey (University of Cambridge), Lorenz Gonschor (University of the South Pacific) and Jon Wilson (King’s College London).