Dumont's CUD...

When I first started writing about  treaties I had a huge amount of trouble accessing many of the standard compilations that are the most useful sources for peace treaties. Only a few years later and there really are a wealth of sources on the web where full works have been digitized and are available for download in multiple formats at only the touch of a button.

Take Jean Dumont’s work Corps Universel Diplomatique du Droit des Gens, (CUD) which is pretty much the first work that gets turned to for the texts of treaties from Charlemagne to the late 17th century. When I first started needing this work I was put off looking at it on microfiche, perhaps the most awkward and least satisfying type of way to look at a historical source. Over the last few years, when I’ve really had to spend much more time with several volumes I’ve seen that look in librarians’ eyes that I read as questioning whether I really need to call up all those large volumes so often and keep them on the reserve shelves for so long.

To be honest, I’ve not felt too bad about doing this: not only did I need to do this, but they’re really the kind of work that should be on open access given that they’re the most authoritative compilation of pre-modern European treaties and are cited so often in any work you could poke a stick at by historians, political scientists and any others interested in the development of international law. Anyway, it seems as though the web has made these kind of problems a thing of the past as I’ve now got all the volumes and supplements of the CUD  sitting in a single folder. 

In some ways, it’s a shame, as I love the books themselves as objects – the smell, the feel of the rough paper, and the element of chance, of opening it up to a page at random and finding some gem I couldn’t find by design. However, these are small things in comparison to the benefits of having it scanned and digitized. Even better, it’s format-friendly. In the online viewing options as well as being available in colour or black and white PDFs, they’re also available in several e-reader friendly formats. There is also a Full Text version. Of course, these are a minefield in terms of typographical errors, which are so commonplace that they’re hardly worth using – except, perhaps, to search for certain terms to see how concepts are repeated (or not) in different periods.

So much academic work is remaining to be done in this area, not only on treaties themselves, but also on Dumont and how he fits in to the wider impulse towards compiling volumes of treaties in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. So at some stage I’ll try to put together something on those themes. Until then, there’s quite enough to be getting on in these volumes already.

Thanks to the John Adams library at the Boston Public Library for digitizing these books and making them available through the Internet Archive. You can access them here: Corps Universel Diplomatique.