Chapter 5 is devoted to the relation between international law and Western civilization. By looking at authors like Johann Caspar Bluntschli, James Lorimer, and John Westlake, the chapter analyzes the conceptions that lay at the foundation of international law in the nineteenth century, and then it traces out the way these conceptions have developed in the twentieth century. Nineteenth-century international law came into being as a European project: it expressed a shared European consciousness and was regarded as a product of the community of Christian and “civilized” peoples. In reality, and this is the central thesis in this Chapter 5, until the second half of the nineteenth century, Western international law was only one among a plurality of international legal systems: these include the Sino-centric system and the siyar system of international Islamic law, and just like the European legal system, they expressed a pretense to universality. A core part of the discussion is therefore informed by the argument that the universality claimed for the West’s international legal system was in fact relative. In this sense this chapter, and indeed the entire book, invites the reader to look at the West through the eyes of “the other.”