European Conquest and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples: The Moral Backwardness of International Society. By Paul Keal. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 274p. $70.00 cloth, $24.99 paper.

Paul Keal's study of the position that indigenous peoples have occupied in international society is best read as a critical contribution to the work of the “English School” of international relations theory. Members of this school have long had an interest in relationships between European and non-European peoples, usually understanding them in terms of the expansion of the European society of sovereign states. Keal takes this as his starting point, but he criticizes it as “incomplete” because “it has excluded the story of peoples destroyed and dispossessed in the process of expansion” (p. 36). The purpose of his book is to broaden our understanding of the expansion of international society to include those stories, and so invite us to think more critically about the moral value of the society of states.