How far back can we go to trace the genealogy of the current international human rights system? And does it matter which position we take on such an arcane academic question? Historians, international lawyers, and human rights activists have recently suggested that there is indeed much at stake. But there the consensus ends, and the accounts reflected in the vibrant literature of recent years diverge radically in the answers they propose. They also differ on fundamental issues about why the lineage of human rights really matters in the twenty-first century.

Until relatively recently, little attention was paid to the historiography of human rights, and the dominant histories mostly reflected an uncritical narrative of relatively steady progress in the evolution of ideas, perhaps dating back even to biblical times, and the gradual adoption of these ideas in the form of legal norms. But these somewhat amorphous and largely undifferentiated genealogies have been strongly challenged by a variety of critics, almost all of whom have sought to identify more precise and recent points of origin for the current human rights family tree. The present analysis takes as its starting point Professor Jenny Martinez’s claim in The Slave Trade and the Origins of International Human Rights Law that contemporary international human rights law has its origins in the early nineteenth-century movement in Britain to abolish the transatlantic slave trade (pp. 149-50). In the later years of the eighteenth century, the British abolitionist movement began to make significant inroads, and by 1807 reformers had succeeded, seemingly against all odds, in passing the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. Parliament banned British subjects from participating in the trade, and the importation of slaves into Britain’s extensive colonial empire was no longer permitted. The British navy began to enforce the law, and offenders were initially tried in British courts. From 1817 onwards, Britain also signed a series of bilateral treaties that led to the creation of so-called “mixed commission courts,” based in Freetown (Sierra Leone), Havana (Cuba), Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), and Paramaribo (Suriname), with the power to determine whether seized ships had been involved in the slave trade and, if so, to order their forfeiture (pp. 78–79). Over the course of the next five decades, the mixed commissions heard more than six hundred cases and freed some eighty thousand slaves (p. 99).

Martínez describes the mixed commissions as “the first international human rights tribunals” (p. 6) and sees them as integral to “the most successful episode in the history of international human rights law” (p. 13). Not content with making a grand historical claim, she also implies that genealogy matters by claiming that the nineteenth-century history she recounts has important implications for many of the key contemporary debates about human rights, so much so that this history should change the way we think about the entire field, including its “origins, limits and potential” (p. 15).

It is, in many ways, an attractive thesis, but it has to contend with the fact that it runs directly counter to a very influential new school of revisionist history. This new interpretation largely dismisses the search for genealogy, separates the anti-slavery movement from what should properly be considered a human rights issue, systematically downplays the international significance of all but the most recent discourses around human rights, gives minimal importance to treaties in this area and even less importance to courts, and places the origins of the international human rights movement firmly in the year 1977.

In this Review, I first consider the extent to which Martinez’s claims about the role played by rights, treaties, and courts in the first half of the nineteenth century are supported by the evidence. I then situate his account in the spectrum of recent historiographical studies in the field. In particular, I compare his approach with that of Professor Samuel Moyn, who is the most influential of the revisionists. I argue that much of the heated controversy that has been generated in recent literature over whether and how the origins of human rights can be discerned is primarily due to a failure to recognize the polycentric nature of the human rights enterprise. Attempts to capture the supposed essence of that enterprise by looking at it through a single lens are inherently flawed and potentially highly misleading. Nevertheless, I conclude by arguing that genealogy matters greatly in these debates, though not in the ways that Martinez suggests.