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Mainstream investment law scholars have delivered their verdict on the relevance of the past: it is "anachronistic and obsolete". Historic controversies over the meaning of customary international law between capital-exporting and capital-importing states have been overtaken, it is said, by nearly 3,000 bilateral investment treaties. This looks mostly like a strategic denial - cabining investment law's past makes the present appear free of the dynamics of domination that characterized prior conflicts. That history, the mainstream maintains, bears no relationship to the meaning and content of contemporary commitments made by states acting in their sovereign capacity and in relative positions of equality.
Kate Miles takes a decidedly different view. History not only matters, but the origins of international investment law reveal a recurring pattern of constraint and resistance through law. We can observe similar patterns of behaviour today, observes Miles. Her book is intended as a contribution to a deep-structure analysis and transformation of the legal regime for the protection of foreign investors. Her object is to rebalance investment law so that it operates in a socially and environmentally sustainable manner.
Both a critical and reconstructivist account, the book begins (in Part 1) with investment law's origins in the quest for imperial control over the resources and persons of the colonized world. Taking a bird's eye view of international legal developments over the course of the 17th to mid-20th centuries, Miles argues that the "history of colonialism, the calculated, often brutal, use of force, and the manipulation of legal doctrines to acquire commercial benefits � drove the construction of international investment law" (at 32). International law was preoccupied solely with protecting investors, whilst host states "were unable to call upon the rule of international law to address damage suffered at the hands of foreign investors" (ibid.).
