Law and Colonial Cultures
Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–1900

Argues that institutions and culture serve as important elements of international legal order.

Lauren Benton (Author)

9780521009263, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 3 December 2001

300 pages
22.8 x 15.3 x 2.1 cm, 0.415 kg

'… this book can be warmly recommended for its topicality, as well as its provocative thesis and rich detail.' The Round Table

Advances an interesting perspective in world history, arguing that institutions and culture - and not just the global economy - serve as important elements of international order. Focusing on colonial legal politics and the interrelation of local and indigenous cultural contests and institutional change, the book uses case studies to trace a shift in plural legal orders - from the multicentric law of early empires to the state-centered law of the colonial and postcolonial world. In the early modern world, the special legal status of cultural and religious others itself became an element of continuity across culturally diverse empires. In the nineteenth century, the state's assertion of a singular legal authority responded to repetitive legal conflicts - not simply to the imposition of Western models of governance. Indigenous subjects across time and in all settings were active in making, changing, and interpreting the law - and, by extension, in shaping the international order.

Acknowledgements
1. Legal regimes and colonial cultures
2. Law in diaspora: the legal regime of the Atlantic world
3. Order out of trouble: jurisdictional tensions in Catholic and Islamic empires
4. A place for the state: legal pluralism as a colonial project in Bengal and West Africa
5. Subjects and witnesses: cultural and legal hierarchies in the Cape Colony and New South Wales
6. Constructing sovereignty: extra-territoriality in the Oriental Republic of Uruguay
7. Culture and the rule(s) of law
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Law [L], General & world history [HBG]