Western governments, companies, economists and lawyers established the
international legal order now known as international investment law to
protect foreign property from a redistribution of wealth through
domestic law making. This book offers a pre-history of these legal
arrangements, focusing on the time before 1959 and the ratification of
the first bilateral investment treaty and the ICSID Convention. It
introduces new archival material, such as arbitral awards, diplomatic
notes and concession agreements, as well as scholarly writings
pertaining to developments in these proceedings. These materials are
systematised into a coherent argument on the protection of foreign
property. The book develops the important role of concession agreements
and their internationalisation for the making of international
investment law, thereby insisting on the private law character of the
foundations of the field. In doing so it displays the analytic force of
viewing law as jurisdictional practice, rather than as a system of
norms.