A Scrap of Paper: Breaking and Making International Law During the Great War

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.

1. Prologue: What We Have Forgotten
2. Belgian Neutrality
3 The "Belgian Atrocities" and the Laws of War on Land
4. Occupation and the Treatment of Enemy Civilians
5. Great Britain and the Blockade
6. Breaking and Making International Law: The Blockade, 1915–1918
7. Germany and New Weapons: Submarines, Zeppelins, Poison Gas, Flamethrowers
8. Unrestricted Submarine Warfare
9. Reprisals: Prisoners of War and Allied Aerial Bombardment
10. ConclusionBibliography
Index

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.