Out of Print
This book consists of a translation ofV. E. Grabar's Materials on the History of the Literature of International Law in Russia, 1647-1917, published in Russian in 1958, edited with revisions, introduction, and bibliography by W. E. Butler.
Grabar was himself a connecting link between the prerevolutionary Russian and Soviet traditions in international law, and this study - unique even amongst Western histories of the law of nations - represents the culmination of a lifetime's work.
Grabar attempted nothing less than an exhaustive guide to the Russian literature on the law of nations, placing those writings and their authors in the larger context of contemporary political, diplomatic, and cultural and economic developments of their period. In so doing he strikes new ground by documenting the interaction of Russian diplomatic and legal practices with those of Europe and later with America.
In the English edition alterations have been made to the text in order to correct errors and interpolate the findings of recent scholarship, but without changing the flow or structure of Grabar's narrative; the Introduction places Grabar's work in the context of Russian and Western scholarship on international and diplomatic legal history, the profile of Grabar himself being based on materials held in his personal archive.
All sources cited by Grabar have been verified and more than a thousand items added, full citations and locations being given for the first time and many ghosts eliminated.