Although international law in Victorian Britain was riven by divisions between historical and analytical, and between naturalist and positivist, approaches to jurisprudence, the major legal thinkers (Henry Maine, John Westlake, Travers Twiss, James Lorimer, Thomas Erskine Holland, and William Edward Hall) shared a set of historicist presuppositions that distinguished them from their eighteenth-century forbears and that profoundly marked modern international law. These included the belief that international law, although historically particular to Europe, was prospectively authoritative for the globe because only Europe could claim to have produced and experienced the progressive civilization that was humanity’s vocation and destiny. Despite imagining a developmental process by which other societies would gradually be admitted to legal standing in the system of civilized states, these thinkers naturalized the differences they asserted between Europeans and others. And despite regarding Europe’s system of international law as both an index and an engine of progress, they professed impotence in the face of European imperial expansion and fear that Europe’s material civilization in the form of increasingly destructive technologies of war might overwhelm the normative achievements of European civilization.