This book focuses on Anglo-American disputes arising out of the civil war in the United States and British interests in the American continent: the Geneva Arbitration, the Venezuela-Guiana Arbitration and the Bhering Sea Arbitration. It draws on those cases as model proceedings which laid the foundations and inspiration for a promotion of international law through the Hague Conferences and by the work of English and American jurists. It considers the encouragement these cases gave to the promotion of public international law and how that contributed to the resolution of inter-state disputes.

In this book, Umut Özsu situates population transfer within the broader history of international law by examining its emergence as a legally formalized mechanism of nation-building in the early twentieth century. The book's principal focus is the 1922-34 compulsory exchange of minorities between Greece and Turkey, a crucially important endeavor whose legal dimensions remain under-scrutinized.