Spaces of Law in American Foreign Relations (English, Daniel S. Margolies)

Product description Review Spaces of Law in American Foreign Relations is the first book to address the legal aspects of late nineteenth-century U.S. foreign relations. It fills a clear historiographical void and, in so doing, not only significantly enhances our understanding of U.S. foreign relations for the years 1877-1898 but also provides insight into the legal bases for governing the empire acquired after 1898. Based on prodigious and highly impressive research, it will be of interest to historians of U.S. foreign relations, of American legal history, and of the Gilded Age.--Joseph A. Fry "author of Dixie Looks Abroad: The South and U.S. Foreign Relations, 1789-1973"Spaces of Law is an important contribution to the scholarship on state violence and American state-building . . .This is an enthralling investigation of the sovereign exception in the making of American foreign policy practices.--John McKiernan-Gonzalez "Southwestern Historical Quarterly"At a time when the 'transnational turn' dominates U.S. historiography, Spaces of Law in American Foreign Relations unearths a forgotten history and makes fresh interventions in several fields, including the legal history of U.S. foreign relations and Mexican borderlands history. Theoretically sophisticated yet written in an accessible style, this is an ambitious and exciting book that links the local and the global, and connects the state and everyday life. Margolies provides a bold new account of law and power at the U.S. border in the nineteenth century.--Christopher Capozzola "author of Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen"Margolie's interpretation of cross-border raids, the legal status of anarchists as apolitical criminals undeserving of extradition exemptions, and the pride and hubris of treaty-making come through in lively narratives and offer considerable insight. Readers with an interest in critical theories of law, space, and the histories of the borderlands as a test site for U.S. empire will gain much.--Ethan Blue "Ethan Blue, Journal of Southern History"This book's analysis on legal spatiality and territoriality and its explanation on how to conceptualize extradition in terms of foreign policy, governance, and borderlands are significant contributions to the history of American foreign relations and to U.S. legal history.--American Historical Review About the Author Daniel S. Margolies is a professor of history at Virginia Wesleyan College. He is the author of Henry Watterson and the New South: The Politics of Empire, Free Trade, and Globalization.