Traces the decline of the American trade in the Mediterranean during the Napoleonic Wars. Discusses the downfall of many American merchants in the region and the need to shift to new economic stragegies.

In 1951, Mohammed Mosaddeq rose to power in Iran and nationalized the country’s British-owned oil industry. The nationalization triggered an international crisis as the British, together with major oil companies, placed an embargo on Iran, effectively de-integrating Iranian oil from the global oil market. Convinced that pressure on Mosaddeq would worsen Iran’s political instability and push the country toward communism, the United States attempted to broker a settlement that would produce a suitable definition of “nationalization,” satisfying Iranian nationalism while preserving the dominance of the oil oligopoly. Successive negotiations in 1951 and 1952 failed to produce a settlement. A myth of Iranian incapacity obscured the companies’ use of market power to isolate Iran while the United States helped redirect flows of oil to make up for Iran’s de-integration.

From the 1950s on, Sino-Swiss relations were unique in Western Europe. Switzerland’s early recognition of China and its neutrality led to a great deal of goodwill in China and extraordinarily amicable relations in the 1950s. China also used its diplomatic missions in Switzerland as political, economic, and cultural hubs for Western Europe and in some cases even for the entire world. For Switzerland, Sino-Swiss relations were supposed to establish Switzerland as an internationally respected, neutral mediating power. However, China mistrusted Swiss neutrality, and it also used Switzerland as a European hub for embargo goods deals. It was only with the Geneva Conference and China’s use of ‘peaceful coexistence’ as the official basis for its foreign policy that Chinese official statements on Swiss neutrality improved.

Ideas and practices often perceived as modern carry a complex premodern history that cannot be excised from their present. This is certainly the case of trade embargoes as economic means for the attainment of political goals. For a variety of reasons, however, tracing change over long periods of time remains an exercise in chronological and spatial jurisdiction. Further complicating our understanding of the convoluted relationship between past and present has been the increasingly pronounced tendency to write in the vein either of a “history of ideology” or, conversely, of a “history of action.” In fact, “theory” and “practice” existed in a dialectical relationship, a cyclical tug of war that produced not so much winners and losers as complex realities that require a thick reading of legal, political, cultural, and social change. This chapter, by contrast, seeks to explain the transfiguration of the legal tradition from the perspective of international law history by focusing on two interrelated transitions.