Writing More Inclusive Histories of International Criminal Law: Lessons from the Slave Trade and Slavery

Historical master-narratives of international criminal law rest on a series of exclusions. Although there is growing recognition of the need to develop more inclusive histories of international criminal law, fundamental questions remain about the politics, methods, and agents of inclusion. This contribution explores some of the challenges of writing more inclusive international criminal legal histories and highlights some of the different registers within which questions of inclusion play out by reference to scholarship on the transatlantic slave trade and slavery. This rich literature provides an opportunity for reflecting on the dilemmas of more inclusive history writing in a cross-cultural racialized context. These challenges apply not just to the past. Scholarship on the slave trade, which has grappled with questions of agency, voice, and empathy, incites a challenge to the representation of victims in international criminal law today.