A Scrap of Paper

In A Scrap of Paper, Isabel V. Hull compares wartime decision making in Germany, Great Britain, and France, weighing the impact of legal considerations in each. She demonstrates how differences in state structures and legal traditions shaped the way the three belligerents fought the war.

Hull focuses on seven cases: Belgian neutrality, the land war in the west, the occupation of enemy territory, the blockade, unrestricted submarine warfare, the introduction of new weaponry, and reprisals. A Scrap of Paper reconstructs the debates over military decision-making and clarifies the role law played—where it constrained action, where it was manipulated, where it was ignored, and how it developed in combat—in each case. A Scrap of Paper is a passionate defense of the role that the law must play to govern interstate relations in both peace and war.

Isabel V. Hull is John Stambaugh Professor of History at Cornell University. She is the author of Absolute Destruction and Sexuality, State and Civil Society in Germany, 1700–1815.

Hull's book is an extremely valuable one. As regulating the conduct of war at sea played a vital role in the evolution of international law, it is fitting that naval and maritime issues play a prominent part in her narrative.... Her work is comparative and displays research in British, French and German archives, but her analysis does remain focused on those nations—with a particular strength on Imperial Germany.

This book will be of interest to serious students of World War I. It explores important, long-forgotten decision making that influenced some of the best known and far-reaching operations in military history. A Scrap of Paper is also a source of unusual case studies for practitioners who need to understand how diplomacy, operational design, and strategic communications shape, and are shaped, by international law. This book illuminates challenges facing practitioners today as much as those facing their predecessors a century ago.

This book should not get lost in the rather large volume of new studies published as we mark the centennial of the First World War. It makes a distinct contribution not only to the bast hisoriography of the war, but also to the developing body of literature on the intersection of law and international conflict.

Cornell University history professor Isabel V. Hull gives a thorough and thoughtful investigation into one of the war's trigger points, the legal issues surrounding Germany’s invasion of Belgium. The assault widened the war by drawing in Britain, committed by treaty to protecting Belgian neutrality. Germany was a signatory to that same treaty, but its army command believed that military necessity trumped international agreements and, as Hull finds, Germany’s military seldom coordinated its planning with the country’s civilian leaders. A Scrap of Paper is a luminous account of war and international law with implications for recent and ongoing world conflicts.

A Scrap of Paper is a strong demonstration of the worth of international law and the laws of war in particular, and vindicates Ms. Hull's standing as one of our greatest historians of modern European politics.

A Scrap of Paper is an outstanding book and a work of exceptional scholarship.

Sir Hew Strachan, All Souls College, University of Oxford, author of The First World War: To Arms:

Over the last decade, with wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the laws of armed conflict have become matters of popular and public interest. Despite the growth of international humanitarian law, much of the law with which we still operate dates from the fifteen years just before the First World War and was applied within it. A Scrap of Paper is the first book to pay sustained attention to the subject of international law in the First World War since 1920. It is not only a timely book, it is an overdue one, and its impact on the study of the war will be important and game-changing. Isabel V. Hull has the linguistic range and scholarly tools to tackle the subject in the truly comparative fashion that its complexity demands.

Martti Koskenniemi, Academy Professor, University of Helsinki, author of The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law 1870–1960:

Isabel V. Hull's passionate narrative of the role of international law in the decision-making processes in Berlin and London during the First World War opens a strikingly original perspective on the consciousness of the wartime actors. This was a war waged also by legal arguments. In the end, the inability and unwillingness of Imperial Germany to defend its case in legal terms crucially undermined its war effort. This is not only superb history, but also the most powerful defense of the role of law in international crisis that I have read, and as such is of obvious contemporary relevance.