Since what has come to be known as the turn to the history of international law, international lawyers writing about international legal history have been partially freed from the pressing need to justify their research on the past of international law by referring to the present normative evolution of their field or its practical doctrinal utility in contemporary international legal debates. The gradual carving out of a sub-disciplinary and relatively self-contained academic space for international legal historical scholarship proprio sensu has been complemented by a closer attention to historical methods imported into the field by international lawyers or exported into it by scholars contributing from adjacent disciplines, namely legal historians and historians. The resulting interdisciplinarization of international legal history has prompted a series of methodological and historiographical debates around the distinction between two main ways of approaching it: those of historians and those of international lawyers. The first of these are allegedly concerned with guaranteeing a ‘well-contextualised historical record of the past for its own sake’, while the second have been described as being ‘mostly interested in the international legal afterglow of past events’.