The academically popular catchphrase ‘the turn to history in international law’ is often used to broadly describe the expansion that the research scope in writing on international legal history and its theory has experienced since the turn of the twenty-first century. However, the expression may come across as a misnomer. This is so, first, because the academic phenomenon this byword purports to capture is not exclusive to international law as a disciplinary field alone but also encompasses several other disciplines, namely legal history, the history of international relations, the history of political thought, and history, which as a discipline has for some time now been engaged in its own ‘international turn’. Therefore to reflect the growingly interdisciplinary cultivation of the history of international law, which partly accounts for some of its contemporary features, including a new set of historiographical and methodological debates and interdisciplinary dialogues, the recent expansion and diversification experienced by this research field may be more adequately described as a ‘turn to the history of international law’.