It is now near conventional wisdom that the nineteenth century witnessed a fundamental shift in the conceptual foundations of international law, and this change was intertwined with a coordinate shift in the geography of Western international legal institutions beyond Europe. At the same time, these shifts are commonly described as also involving a general process of secularization which decentered religiously inspired notions of natural law for positivist legal science which helped facilitate the progressive inclusion of non-Christian nations in the Middle East and Asia. As generally follows grand narratives of break and rupture, more granular histories have produced nuanced and ambivalent explorations of the myriad ways in which social change unfolds in muddier path-dependent genealogies.