Australia and the World

Abstract

Reflecting on the country’s relationship with international law, James Crawford, Australia’s most prominent international lawyer, wrote that ‘Australia has always, despite the historical remoteness from international affairs, manifested its support for a global rules-based order.’ Yet a historical turn in international legal scholarship has recovered the origins of this global order in the expansion and domination of European empires. Indigenous scholars also reminds us that First Nations’ legal orders governed inter-national relations for millennia before this hegemonic imposition. This chapter takes up this new scholarship to retell the legal history of Australia through three successive worlds. The first world is the ancient history and unfinished business of inter-national relationships between First Nations, and between them and the settler state. The second world is the British Empire, a global state that aimed to impose a single legal order over its imperial jurisdictions. The third world is the international system of sovereign states that covers the globe today. If Australians have pursued a ‘rules-based order,’ this pursuit always reflected their own conflicting desires for the liberation and domination of neighboring peoples, lands and seas.