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Law and Colonial Cultures

Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–1900

Lauren Benton author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Cambridge University Press

Published:3rd Dec '01

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Law and Colonial Cultures cover

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

Advances an interesting perspective in world history, arguing that institutions and culture serve as important elements of international order. Focusing on colonial legal politics, it uses case studies to trace a shift from the multicentric law of early empires to the state-centered law of the colonial world.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.

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

  • Winner of James Willard Hurst Prize of the Law and Society Association 2003
  • Winner of World History Association Prize 2003

ISBN: 9780521009263

Dimensions: 228mm x 153mm x 21mm

Weight: 415g

300 pages