The turn to history in international cultural heritage law and heritage studies - Review of Maud Webster, Heritage and the Existential Need for History, Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2021, ISBN 9780813066844, 120 pages

In the midst of multiple geopolitical crises and armed conflicts, and after a global pandemic, a common trend has emerged across different fields of study, from the hard sciences to the social sciences and the humanities: the so-called “turn to history.” The turn to history in international law refers to a significant methodological shift that has occurred over the past two decades as international legal scholars have increasingly incorporated historical methods and perspectives into their work. International lawyers have investigated the historical origins, development, and contexts of international legal doctrines and institutions. Rather than treating international law as a timeless and ethereal system of rules, scholars are examining how it concretely emerged from specific historical, political, and cultural contexts. Far from being celebratory, this soul-searching historical engagement has questioned standard accounts regarding international law as a progressive evolution toward justice. Instead, such histories have explored the lights and shadows of the field, thus revealing its complex and multilayered developments. This historical engagement has important implications for contemporary international law. Understanding the historical contingency of legal doctrines can reveal hidden assumptions, expose continuities with problematic pasts, and open up space for reimagining the future of international law. It thus connects to broader critical approaches in international law. Unsurprisingly, then, even experts in international cultural heritage law and heritage studies are gradually using history as a useful lens for investigating their field. Within heritage studies, the connection between history and heritage appears to be a natural one. After all, if heritage studies scholars regard heritage as a process initiated in the past, then historians who study the past can contribute to this field of research by offering insightful understandings of that past. International legal historians have also used heritage as a source for writing history. More fundamentally, as a field, heritage studies are at the junction of several different disciplines, including mainly archaeology and architecture but also anthropology, museology, musicology, and increasingly, history.