The history of international law has traditionally been the least explored area of the discipline. Nevertheless the study of the discipline’s past has experienced an upsurge with the publication of a range of significant works dealing with international legal history. The latest of these publications – the Oxford Handbook of the History of International Law edited by Bardo Fassbender, Anne Peters, Simone Peter and Daniel Högger – is a monumental work that includes 44 articles, in addition to 21 biographical portraits, covering a variety of topics related to the discipline’s past. With most of the articles written by seasoned scholars exploring a range of hot topics, this volume, first of its kind amongst the large collective works, undoubtedly sought to stand out as an authoritative reference for international law’s past both in form and substance. The temporal scope of the book is confined to the start of the discipline in the fifteenth century up to the formal end of imperialism right after the end of the Second World War.