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

by Lauren Benton

• ISBN13: 9780521009263
• ISBN10: 052100926X
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2001-12-03
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

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.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	xi
Legal Regimes and Colonial Cultures	1	(30)
Law in Diaspora: The Legal Regime of the Atlantic World	31	(49)
Order out of Trouble: Jurisdictional Tensions in Catholic and Islamic Empires	80	(47)
A Place for the State: Legal Pluralism as a Colonial Project in Bengal and West Africa	127	(40)
Subjects and Witnesses: Cultural and Legal Hierarchies in the Cape Colony and New South Wales	167	(43)
Constructing Sovereignty: Extraterritoriality in the Oriental Republic of Uruguay	210	(43)
Culture and the Rule(s) of Law	253	(14)
Bibliography	267	(16)
Index	283