This chapter aims to show the role of oil concessions and arbitrations conducted on disputes arising from them for the internationalisation of contracts. The Sheikh of Abu Dhabi Arbitration between the British oil company Petroleum Development (Trucial Coast Ltd) and the Sheikh of Abu Dhabi of 1951 was one of the first of a number of arbitrations against oil-producing countries in the Middle East in the period after the Second World War and serves as a point of entry for this analysis. The argument this chapter advances is twofold. First, it aims to suggest that the construction of the international legal order over concession agreements shielded the economic sphere from sovereign assertions over production and resources and thereby maintained imperial patterns of domination in favour of Western states and their companies. Second, it argues that the driving force behind the making of this international legal order was the theory and practice of British international lawyers relying on notions of natural law, on creative argumentation and on repetition to establish the authority of the international legal order.

Hersch Lauterpacht was a strong proponent of international adjudication. He was perhaps the foremost exponent among international lawyers for a strong role for the international judiciary in preventing war and resolving disputes between states. He was a particularly strong backer of the Permanent Court of International Justice, which was created by the League of Nations. He wrote that advisory opinions were important in providing advice that might lead to the resolution of disputes. In this situation, however, he opposed reference to the International Court of Justice, which had replaced the Permanent Court of International Justice, of the question of the legal status of Palestine and the legality of the declaration of a Jewish state.

Following the initial Security Council discussion of Syria’s proposal for an advisory opinion, the Legal Advisor for the Provisional Government of Israel, Jacob Robinson, approached Hersch Lauterpacht, Professor of international law at the University of Cambridge, asking him to suggest arguments to make in opposition to Syria. A few months earlier, at the request of the political body proposing Jewish statehood, Lauterpacht had drafted a declaration for a Jewish state in Palestine. Lauterpacht answered with a series of reasons why members of the Security Council should defeat Syria’s proposal. Lauterpacht stressed the complexity of the issue as a reason against seeking an advisory opinion. He also suggested saying that the issues on which Syria wanted an opinion were political rather than legal in nature. Lauterpacht’s responses reflected both his legal advice and his personal opposition to Syria’s proposal. His reasons were conveyed to Aubrey Eban, who was the main spokesperson for the PGI at the United Nations.

Finally, the book’s epilogue turns its attention to the further developments undergone by the concept of humanitarian intervention in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. What is striking is the degree to which the examples of the nineteenth century remained in people’s minds and took on the function of a discursive frame of reference in subsequent debates in international law. Their function was that of a surface onto which further developments of the idea towards current concepts and debates were projected and in which they could be reflected. All the while, however, there was a tendency to ignore their colonial and imperial aspects.