This book offers historical perspectives of modern corporations through property, investment, trade, and labour from different approaches, including those of political economy, Third World approaches to international law [TWAIL], critical legal scholarship, economic history, and socioanthropic perspectives. The book uses four case-studies which delve into questionable labour practices and slavery in Liberia by Firestone Inc., in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; the Nazi regime and its relationship with corporations; the struggle for control over oil in Persia in the mid-twentieth century; and the initiatives for a new international economic order [NIEO].

Through these narratives, Lustig establishes that “international legal doctrines in the context of labour, natural resources, investment, and criminal responsibility directly informed the regulation of the private business corporations in global settings” (p. 222). The historical narratives, as set out in the four case-studies, are examples of the heinous ignorance of international law by multinational corporations. In that regard, multinational corporations, which see themselves as part of the continuity of “company-state” relations (p. 164) that developed after the fall of the slave trade, were the new colonialists in pursuit of profit. Hence, where the Royal Niger Company (1886–1900) eventually merged into present day Unilever, or the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company [AIOC] into contemporary British Petroleum [BP]—these “quasi-sovereigns[s]” (p. 26) were, first and foremost, about “commercial (rather than governance) endeavours” (p. 26).

Although the book does not address the issue of human rights and corporations in much detail, for example noting that the rise of the NIEO gave way to “human rights as the next normative rationale for corporate responsibility” (p. 216), some contextual analysis would have helped to address any lingering questions that the reader may have on this topic. Nevertheless, the arguments in this book are not complex, and they offer descriptive accounts that show the history of international (economic) law through different paradigms such as trade, investment, the multinational corporation, and the political economy of international law. These approaches are of course also a risk, if it is not easily discernible that this is not the history of international economic law as itis commonly understood.

Lustig may, however, escape criticism because the book, with good measure, holds all the narratives together through the role and participation of the multinational corporation in the international legal system. Moreover, Lustig uses the final chapter to modify and clarify “the long history of the regulation of private business corporations in international law”. Hence, Lustig seems aware that, depending on the reader, certain criticisms are inevitable, and whether drawing on critical approaches or TWAIL studies, international law, like multinational corporations with historical roots in Chartered Companies, is imperialist in nature or has imperialist-like approaches. Lustig's work is an excellent piece of scholarship providing much information regarding the direct paradigms that shape multinational corporations in international law and is a useful reference tool for those who are working on the history of international (economic) law.