In this authoritative work, Emmanuelle Jouannet, a leading French scholar of public international law and legal theory, takes a fresh look at the emergence of classical international law and provides an original and decisive reinterpretation. According to the modern and conventional account, Grotius and his predecessors, the Spanish jurists, are credited as the 'fathers' of the modern ius gentium. However, this picture of history is now both inaccurate and incomplete. With rare erudition based on an exhaustive analysis of the foundational concepts and principal texts of the great jurists of...