While the history of international law has been mainly dominated by intellectual history, the neighboring humanities and social sciences have witnessed a ‘material turn.’ Influenced by the new materialisms, historians, sociologists, and anthropologists have highlighted the role of objects and nonhuman infrastructures in the making of the social. Law, however, has been conspicuously absent from these discussions. Only until recently, things began to be studied as instruments of – global – regulation. In this article, I trace an intellectual history of the intellectual history of international law, contextualizing it since its inception in the so-called ‘Cambridge School’ to its spread into the legal field via the Critical Legal Studies movement and its final import into international law in the last two decades. I conclude arguing that international legal historians can depart from the ‘well-worn paths’ of intellectual and conceptual history to engage with the materiality (past, present, and future) of global governance.

虽然国际法史主要以思想史为主，但邻近的人文社会科学却出现了“物质转向”。受新唯物主义的影响，历史学家、社会学家和人类学家强调了物体和非人类基础设施在社会形成中的作用。然而，这些讨论中显然没有法律。直到最近，才开始将事物作为全球监管的工具进行研究。在这篇文章中，我追溯了国际法思想史的思想史，将其置于所谓的“剑桥学派”中，通过批判法律研究运动传播到法律领域，并最终导入国际近二十年来的法律。