How does international law conceptualize the natural environment? What and whose premises and interests inform this conceptualization? Can its depletion, destruction and change be linked to law? Sigrid Boysen’s monograph, Die postkoloniale Konstellation: Natürliche Ressourcen und das Völkerrecht der Moderne grapples with these and other questions. The book argues that colonial and capitalist expansion’s disregard for planetary boundaries coconstituted the fields of modern international economic and environmental law and triggered the transnationalization of law. Boysen convincingly narrates a genealogy of ideas from imperial relations to the natural environment in the colonies all the way to the recent legal developments in the field of climate change and shows how law has consistently upheld ambivalent human-nature relations, understanding nature as a commodity and object to be civilized and rescued from the uncivilized. This review essay reflects on some of the book’s central messages and propositions.