Odious Debt
Bankruptcy, International Law, and the Making of Latin America
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Oxford University Press
Published:21st Nov '24
£100.00
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What are fallen tyrants owed? What makes debt illegitimate? And when is bankruptcy moral? Drawing on new archival sources, this book shows how Latin American nations have wrestled with the morality of indebtedness and insolvency since their foundation, and outlines how their history can shed new light on contemporary global dilemmas. With a focus on the early modern Spanish Empire and modern Mexico, Colombia, and Argentina, and based on archival research carried out across seven countries, Odious Debt studies 400 years of history and unearths overlooked congressional debates and understudied thinkers. The book shows how discussions on the morality of debt and default played a structuring role in the construction and codification of national constitutions, identities, and international legal norms in Latin America. This new history of the moral economy of the Hispanic World from the 1520s to the 1920s illuminates contemporary issues in international law and international relations. Latin American jurists developed a global critique of economics and international law that continues to generate pressing questions about debt, bankruptcy, reparations, and the pursuit of a moral global economy.
Edward Jones Corredera, the author of this brilliant book, takes a rigorous historical look at a crucial subject, where international law intersects with politics, religion, culture, moral economy, and finance. An essential reading for anyone who wishes to know in depth not only the irruption of Spanish American countries in the world scene, but, more broadly, the intellectual assumptions on which international relations in the modern world were founded. * Javier Fernández-Sebastián, Professor of History of Political Thought at the University of the Basque Country *
Odious Debt is an important interdisciplinary contribution to the global intellectual history of international law, the political economy of foreign debts, and the modern inception of Latin America in international society. Edward Jones Corredera´ s superb book illuminates the importance of foreign debts for the global history and political economy of international law, and the regional history of constitutional building in Latin America. A must read for international lawyers, historians, IR scholars, and political economists. * Juan Pablo Scarfi, Assistant Professor of International Relations at the Catholic University of Chile *
ISBN: 9780192888280
Dimensions: 240mm x 162mm x 20mm
Weight: 560g
272 pages