BOOK: Shaunnagh DORSETT & John MCLAREN (eds.), Legal Histories of the British Empire Laws, Engagements and Legacies. New York: Routledge, 2014, 256 p. ISBN 9780415728928, £29,99

(image source: Amazon)

The Legal History blog signalled the publication of the collective work Legal Histories of the British Empire. Laws, engagements and legacies (eds. Prof. dr. Shaunnagh Dorsett & Prof. em. dr. John McLaren) with Routledge back in 2014.

Just as our American counterpart, the ESCLH blog omitted to signal this work at its publication, although we did divulge the call for papers of the initial conference at the National University of Singapore in 2012. The work is available for just £29,99 (paperback).

Book abstract:

 This book is a major contribution to our understanding of the role played by law(s) in the British Empire. Using a variety of interdisciplinary approaches, the authors provide in-depth analyses which shine new light on the role of law in creating the people and places of the British Empire. Ranging from the United States, through Calcutta, across Australasia to the Gold Coast, these essays seek to investigate law’s central place in the British Empire, and the role of its agents in embedding British rule and culture in colonial territories. One of the first collections to provide a sustained engagement with the legal histories of the British Empire, in particular beyond the settler colonies, this work aims to encourage further scholarship and new approaches to the writing of the histories of that Empire. Legal Histories of the British Empire: Laws, Engagements and Legacies will be of value not only to legal scholars and graduate students, but of interest to all of those who want to know more about the laws in and of the British Empire.

Table of contents:

Chapter One Laws, Engagements, and Legacies: the Legal Histories of the British Empire An Introduction, Shaunnagh Dorsett and John McLaren,

Part I – Framing Empire: People and Institutions,
Chapter Two Navigating the Scylla of Imperial Politico-Legal Aspirations and Charybdis of Colonial Micro-Politics in the British Empire: The Case of the Judges, John McLaren,
Chapter Three Asserting Judicial Sovereignty: The Debate over the Abolition of Privy Council Jurisdiction in British Africa, Bonny Ibhawoh,
Chapter Four Law, Culture and History: Amir Ali’s Interpretation of Islamic Tradition, Nandini Chatterjee, Chapter Five A Judicial Maverick: John Gorrie at Large in the Victorian Empire, Bridget Brereton,

Part II – Laws
Chapter Six Benjamin Knowles v. Rex: Judging Murder, Race and Respectability from Colonial Ghana to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, 1928-30, Stacey Hynd,
Chapter Seven Inventing Extraordinary Criminality: A Study of Criminalization by the Calcutta Goondas Act, Sugata Nandi,
Chapter Eight Sovereignties in Dispute: The Komagata Maru and Spectral Indigeneities, 1914, Renisa Mawani,

Part III – Engagements
Chapter Nine Imperial Legacies: Chartered Enterprises in Northern British America, Philip Girard
Chapter Ten Understanding ‘Chinese Customs’: Sinchew rulings in the Straits Settlements, 1830s-1870s, Stephanie Po-yin Chung,
Chapter Eleven Translating the Hedaya: Colonial Foundations of Islamic Law, John Strawson,
Chapter Twelve Travelling Laws: Burton and the Draft Act for the Protection and Amelioration of the Aborigines 1838 (NSW), Shaunnagh Dorsett,

Part IV – Legacies Chapter
Thirteen Legacies of Empire: Race and Labor Contracts in the Upper Mississippi River Valley, Allison Gorsuch,
Chapter Fourteen Empire on Trial: Slavery, Villeinage, and Law in Imperial Britain, Dana Rabin,
Chapter Fifteen Macaulay’s India Law Reforms and Labour in the British Empire, Barry Wright,
Chapter Sixteen A Slave Trade Jurisdiction: Attempts against the Slave Trade and the Making of a Space of Law (Arabo-Persian Gulf, Indian Ocean, Red Sea, circa 1820-1900), Guillemette Crouze

On the editors:

Shaunnagh Dorsett is Professor of Law at the University of Technology, Sydney. Her work focuses on Crown-Indigenous relations in colonial New South Wales / New Zealand and sovereignty formation in the first half of the nineteenth century.
John McLaren is Emeritus Professor of Law, University of Victoria, British Columbia. His research interests lie in the field of Canadian and Comparative Colonial Legal History. He has written widely and edited several books of essays in those fields.

More information on the publisher's website.

Please note that this book has been review in Comparative Legal History, the Society's journal (Volume II, Issue 2, pp. 325-334, PDF).

BOOK: Lauren BENTON & Lisa FORD, Rage for Order: The British Empire and the Origins of International Law, 1800-1850. Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard UP, 2016, 288 p., ISBN 9780674737464, € 36

  (image source: Harvard UP)

The Legal History Blog announced a forthcoming book by Lauren Benton & Lisa Ford, RAge for Order: The British Empire and the Origins of International Law, 1800-1850, at Harvard University Press. The book is available at a democratic price (€ 36).

Book description:

International law burst on the scene as a new field in the late nineteenth century. Where did it come from? Rage for Order finds the origins of international law in empires—especially in the British Empire’s sprawling efforts to refashion the imperial constitution and use it to order the world in the early part of that century.
Lauren Benton and Lisa Ford uncover the lost history of Britain’s global empire of law in colonial conflicts and bureaucratic dispatches rather than legal treatises and case law. Tracing constitutional politics around the world, Rage for Order shows that attempts to refashion the British imperial constitution touched on all the controversial issues of the day, from slavery to revolution. Scandals in turbulent colonies targeted petty despots and augmented the power of the Crown to intervene in the administration of justice. Campaigns to police piracy and slave trading linked British interests to the stability of politically fragmented regions. Dull bureaucrats dominated legal reform, but they did not act in isolation. Indigenous peoples, slaves, convicts, merchants, and sailors all scrambled to play a part in reordering the empire and the world beyond it. Yet, through it all, legal reform focused on promoting order, not advancing human rights or charting liberalism.
Rage for Order maps a formative phase in world history when imperial, not international, law anchored visions of global order. This sweeping story changes the way we think about the legacy of the British Empire and the meaning of international law today.

 On the authors:

Lauren Benton is Nelson O. Tyrone, Jr., Professor of History and Professor of Law at Vanderbilt University.
Lisa Ford is Associate Professor in History at the University of New South Wales.

Reviews:

“This book is a major achievement. Benton and Ford provide a powerful new way of understanding the global reach and effects of modern British imperialism. By connecting projects of colonial governance with new visions of global legal ordering, they offer a bold rethinking of the imperial context for the emergence of modern international law.”—Robert Travers, Cornell University
“The authors go deep into the archives to reveal the crucial interactions of countless colonial governors, crusading ship captains, misguided magistrates, inquisitive imperial commissioners, and frustrated Westminster bureaucrats whose words and deeds collectively constituted a nascent global legal order. By telling the often marvelous stories of law’s minions rather than its mandarins, Benton and Ford have done nothing less than help us understand the shambling character of our own international legal order as it arose out of empire two centuries ago.”—Paul D. Halliday, University of Virginia
“Benton and Ford marshal a vast array of archival evidence to shed new light on the development of law within and at the edges of the British Empire. They show that political and military activities were saturated with legal claims and that many and often competing actors—merchants and missionaries, sailors and convicts, middling officials and local elites—contributed to a ‘new vernacular imperial constitutionalism,’ with profound and unexpected consequences for international law.”—Jennifer Pitts, University of Chicago

Table of contents:

1. A Global Empire of Law
2. Controlling Despotic Dominions
3. The Commissioner’s World
4. The Promise of Protection
5. Ordering the Oceans
6. An Empire of States
7. A Great Disorder
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index

BOOK: Martin HECKEL, Martin Luthers Reformation und das Recht [Ius Ecclesiasticum; 114]. Tübingen: Mohr/Siebeck, 2016. XIV + 988 p. ISBN 978-3-16-154211-4; € 69.

(image source: Mohr/Siebeck)

Mohr/Siebeck published an comprehensive study by Prof. em. dr. Martin Heckel (Tübingen) on the influence of Martin Luther's theology on law.

On the book:

Das hier vorgestellte Werk wird zeitgleich als Broschurausgabe ohne Reihenzugehörigkeit erscheinen.
Die Entwicklung des evangelischen Kirchenrechts und des Staatskirchenrechts in Deutschland seit Beginn der Reformation ist nur aus der steten Wechselwirkung der juristischen Probleme und Dynamik mit ihren theologischen und politischen Ursachen und Folgen zu erfassen. Erst durch ihre Umsetzung in Rechtsformen führen die geistigen und gesellschaftlichen Kräfte und Bewegungen zur umwälzenden Veränderung oder beharrlichen Verfestigung ihrer Epoche.
Durch seine rechtshistorischen Aspekte und Analysen will dieses Werk auch den theologischen und historischen Nachbardisziplinen dienen, auf deren Vorarbeiten es fußt. Es ist problemgeschichtlich ausgerichtet. Es sucht die Entstehung und Wandlung der rechtlichen Institutionen aus den geistlichen und weltlichen Ursprüngen, die dem modernen Empfinden fremd geworden sind, verständlich zu machen und zugleich das Bewußtsein der Kontinuität zu stärken, die unsere pluralistische Geisteswelt und Rechtsordnung mit ihren geschichtlichen Wurzeln verbindet und bis heute prägt und bedingt. Es erstrebt keine handbuchartige Vollständigkeit. Manche Phänomene werden daher detailliert in Nahsicht, andere distanziert im Überblick behandelt. Im Aufbau wechselt es zwischen der chronologischen Schilderung des Geschehens und der systematischen Darstellung der Probleme und Institutionen, um weder auf narrative Anschaulichkeit noch auf systematische Exaktheit zu verzichten. Zeitliche Vorgriffe und Rückblenden, auch Wiederholungen, sind deshalb unvermeidlich. Querverweise wollen die abschnittsweise Lektüre erleichtern. Ausblicke auf die Gegenwart wurden nicht gescheut. Die Individualität geschichtlicher Erscheinungen gewinnt durch historische Rechtsvergleichung ohne Nivellierung an Profil. In diesem Buch kommt Luther selbst zu Wort. Mit ausführlichen Zitaten seiner Schriften will es den Theologen, Historikern und Juristen als einschlägiges Luther-Lesebuch dienen.
(Aus dem Vorwort)

On the author:

Martin Heckel Geboren 1929; Studium der Rechtswissenschaft in München; 1955 Promotion; 1960 Habilitation in Heidelberg; 1960–97 o. Professor des öffentlichen Rechts und Kirchenrechts in Tübingen; seit Oktober 1997 emeritiert. 

More information on the publisher's website.

BOOK: "Historia del Derecho mercantil" by Carlos Petit (Madrid, 2016)

Carlos Petit, Historia del Derecho mercantil  

Madrid, 2016
all information here

Table of Contents: 

La cultura del ius mercatorum. Mercatura y ius mercatorum. Cultura y costumbres mercantiles. La casa de comercio. Saberes del mercader. Estructuras del ius mercatorum. VSVRA. Corporación. Ordenanzas del consulado de Bilbao. El monarca, los cambios y el comercio. Gobierno "activo" e iniciativas comerciales. Banca y banqueros en el Madrid ilustrado. El Real Banco de San Carlos (1782). Práctica cambiaria a uso de libertinos. Hacia el derecho mercantil español. Derecho mercantil y constitución (1812). Derecho mercantil y codificación (1829). El código y las tierras de la monarquía. Las anónimas y el código de Comercio (1830-1847). Derecho mercantil y legislación (1848). Derecho mercantil y jurisdicción (1868). Derecho mercantil y educación (1883).

WORKSHOP: "Migrating Words, Migrating Merchants: Migrating Law" (Frankfurt, September 19-21 2016)

WHAT Migrating Words, Migrating Merchants: Migrating Law, 4th workshop on "the Making of Commercial Law"

WHEN September 19-21 2016

WHERE Frankfurt

all information here

The Fondaco dei Tedeschi in the commercial center of Venice, by the eastern foot of the Rialto Bridge, represents the scope of this workshop – in all three regards suggested in the title.

The Italian word fondaco is a loanword from the Arabic فندق, ”funduq“, which in its turn roots in the Greek πανδοκεῖον, “pandokeion”. These three languages generally share an important vocabulary in regard to economy and trade, and the two younger ones, Arabic and Italian, apparently found both the word and the concept behind it useful enough to import it. The concept, although with important variations, always turns around the issue of housing, feeding, lodging, and controlling foreigners, as well as dealing with them in every sense of the word. Olivia Remie Constable examined both word and fact in her book “Housing the stranger in the Mediterranean World ” (2004) and was able to lay out the 2000-year long journey of the various ways how trade-faring cities and nations hosted and controlled strangers and namely foreign merchants. This is one spectacular example of a wide-spread phenomenon within the realm of commercial law. Let it suffice to list just a few more examples of “migrating words”, choosing three words of the language of the country in which the Commercial Revolution took off: Avaria, Accomandita, Bancarotta, and three words from today’s German (!) legal language: Leasing, Factoring, Franchising – words whose American origin is not necessarily obvious to German law students who use them every day.

The Fondaco dei Tedeschi also represents the “migrating merchants” in our title. Trading techniques are closely intertwined with the question how the merchant was travelling in order to learn the trade, accompany his goods, meet business associates, buy and sell, receive accounts, or even move and change the center of his commercial activity to a new city. It is a likely assumption that the migrating merchant carried his commercial and legal tools with him just like a stonemason would have carried his working tools with him on his way from one construction site to the next. But there, at the end of his journey from Nurnberg to Venice of from Dortmund to Bruges, the merchant encountered new ideas and techniques, and he must have compared his set of tools with those of his foreign partners. The early modern literature on commerce and commercial law (Stracca, Malynes, Marquard, Savary) has one main purpose: Inform the merchant about all matters relevant to his success on his journey and at the destination of his trading route.

The idea behind this workshop is to approach the “migration of laws” by following the migration of words and people in order to verify if, and to what extent, principles, rules and practices, especially in the mercantile world, moved by means of men in flesh and blood more than by means of books. If the interaction between the locals and the strangers, and more precisely the mutual learning process in regard to the daily commercial and legal routine can be considered the necessary premises for the spread of commercial practices, the diffusion of certain technical words provide a witness of the circulation of ideas and rules. The analysis of these two different and at the same time strictly connected kinds of “migrations” can provide a fresh point of view on the problem of the diffusion of commercial practices at a transnational level, with focus on the Mediterranean and Northern European seas.

Osmosis, hybridization, assimilation – a number of widely discussed key words spring to the mind. The two trading route examples were chosen with intention: In 1508, the City council of Nurnberg adopted the Venetian tutelage laws – a fact important enough to the lenders to boast with it by painting the scene in oil and hanging the painting into the Palazzo dei Dogi; and the Hanseatic merchant Hildebrand Veckinchusen who spent childhood years in Dortmund organized his book keeping by copying the model he encountered in Italian and Flemish firms after moving to Bruges around the year 1400. It won’t be hard to come up with additional examples but we will try to take the next step and ask: Why? The merchants adopting something foreign and new must have deemed it favorable, but based on what reflections? What did they find weak and disadvantageous about the usual, traditional ways they were brought up with? Were there regrets? After the failure of the Venetian Company Hildebrand’s brother Sivert Veckinchusen complained in a letter that they should better have stuck to the “old nourishment”, referring to the traditional trade along the axis Bruges-Lübeck-Novgorod. If we listen carefully, we can still hear Sivert sigh.

Programme

BOOK: Martti KOSKENNIEMI, Walter RECH & Manuel JIMÉNEZ FONSECA (eds.), International Law and Empire: Historical Explorations [The History and Theory of International Law]. Oxford: Oxford University Press, Dec 2016, 416p. ISBN 978-0198795575, £ 80.

(image source: amazon)

Oxford University Press will publish a volume on 1 December 2016 on the theme International Law and Empire: Historical Explorations. This is a product of the project "International Law, Religion and Empire" under the direction of Martti Koskenniemi at the Eric Castrén Institute (Helsinki).

Book description:

In times in which global governance in its various forms, such as human rights, international trade law, and development projects, is increasingly promoted by transnational economic actors and international institutions that seem to be detached from democratic processes of legitimation, the question of the relationship between international law and empire is as topical as ever. By examining this relationship in historical contexts from early modernity to the present, this volume aims to deepen current understandings of the way international legal institutions, practices, and narratives have shaped specifically imperial ideas about and structures of world governance. As it explores fundamental ways in which international legal discourses have operated in colonial as well as European contexts, the book enters a heated debate on the involvement of the modern law of nations in imperial projects. Each of the chapters contributes to this emerging body of scholarship by drawing out the complexity and ambivalence of the relationship between international law and empire. They expand on the critique of western imperialism while acknowledging the nuances and ambiguities of international legal discourse and, in some cases, the possibility of counter-hegemonic claims being articulated through the language of international law. Importantly, as the book suggests that international legal argument may sometimes be used to counter imperial enterprises, it maintains that international law can barely escape the Eurocentric framework within which the progressive aspirations of internationalism were conceived.

Table of contents:

Introduction, Martti Koskenniemi
Part I: Epistemologies of Empire and International Law 1: Provincializing Grotius: International Law and Empire in a Seventeenth-Century Malay Mirror, Arthur Weststeijn
2: Indirect Hegemonies in International Legal Relations: The Debate of Religious Tolerance in Early Republican China, Stefan Kroll
3: International Law, Empire, and the Relative Indeterminacy of Narrative, Walter Rech
Part II: Legal Discourses of Empire 4: The Concepts of Universal Monarchy and Balance of Power in the First Half of the Seventeenth Century-a Case Study, Peter Schröder
5: Between Faith and Empire: The Justification of the Spanish Intervention in the French Wars of Religion in the 1590s, Randall Lesaffer
6: Jus gentium and the Transformation of Latin American Nature: One More Reading of Vitoria?, Manuel Jiménez Fonseca
7: Cerberus: The State, the Empire, and the Company as Subjects of International Law in Grotius and the Peace of Westphalia, José-Manuel Barreto
8: Revolution, Empire, and Utopia: Tocqueville and the Intellectual Background of International Law, Julie Saada
Part III: Managing Empire: Imperial Administration and Diplomacy 9: Towards the Empire of a 'Civilizing Nation': The French Revolution and its Impact on Relations with the Ottoman Regencies in the Maghreb, Christian Windler
10: A Comporting Sovereign, Tribes, and the Ordering of Imperial Authority in Colonial Upper Canada of the 1830s, PG McHugh
11: Territory, Sovereignty, and the Construction of the Colonial Space, Luigi Nuzzo
Part IV: A Legal Critique of Empire? 12: An Anti-Imperialist Universalism? Jus Cogens and the Politics of International Law, Umut Özsu
13: Drift towards an Empire? The Trajectory of American Reformers in the Cold War, Hatsue Shinohara
14: Imperium sine fine: Carneades, the Splendid Vice of Glory, and the Justice of Empire, Benjamin Straumann
15: Scepticism of the Civilizing Mission in International Law, Andrew Fitzmaurice 

On the editors:

Martti Koskenniemi is Academy Professor and Director of the Erik Castrén Institute of International Law and Human Rights at the University of Helsinki, a Professorial Fellow at Melbourne Law School, and Centennial Professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He has held visiting professorships at New York University, the University of Cambridge, the University of Utrecht, Columbia University, the University of São Paulo, the University of Toronto, and the Universities of Paris I, II, X and XVI. He was a member of the Finnish diplomatic service from 1978 to 1994 and of the International Law Commission (UN) from 2002 to 2006. His publications include From Apology to Utopia: The Structure of International Legal Argument (1989), The GentleCivilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law 1870-1960 (2001), The Politics of International Law (2011), and The Cambridge Companion to International Law (2012, co-edited with Professor James Crawford). 

Walter Rech is a postdoctoral researcher at the Erik Castrén Institute of International Law and Human Rights, University of Helsinki. His research interests are located in the history and theory of international law and international politics. His publications include Enemies of Mankind: Vattel's Theory of Collective Security ( 2013). 

Manuel Jiménez Fonseca is a doctoral researcher at the Erik Castrén Institute of International Law and Human Rights, University of Helsinki. His research interests include the historical relationship between international law and nature, development, and social movements. His publications include 'The Colonization of American Nature and the Early Developments of International Law' 12 Journal of the History of International Law (2010) 189. 

The book can be pre-ordered with amazon.

JOURNAL: "Rechtsgeschichte – Legal History" (issue 24, 2016)

Rechtsgeschichte – Legal History issue 24

The most recent issue of the journal of the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History has just been released and is now available online in open access and in print.

Rg 24 is dedicated to the concept of translation:

The research section opens the issue with a contribution from Gerhard Dilcher that has been translated into English: »The Germanists and the Historical School of Law: German Legal Science between Romanticism, Realism, and Rationalization«. This article is followed by an analysis by Jakob Zollmann that sheds light on an almost forgotten legal historical phenomenon, »Austrägalgerichtsbarkeit - Interstate Dispute Settlement in a Confederate Arrangement, 1815 to 1866«. Finally, Pedro Cardim addresses the expansive and fundamental field of research within legal history focusing on European empires, in particular the status of the overseas territories of the Iberian monarchy in the 16^th and 17^th centuries.

The first focus section, »Translators: Mediators in Legal Transfers«, deals with cultural translators of normativity, and the second focus, »Legal History in Action: Laying Down Indigenous Customs in Writing«, treats the translation of legal customs into writing – a translation into another medium. Such processes of translation may very well represent a key to understanding local, national, regional, or even global legal histories; however, in the past they have simply received insufficient consideration.

The two forum sections strive to provide a snapshot of a broad discussion concerning issues important to legal historical research. The first one poses the following question: what kind of research results can be expected from the much discussed »Digital Humanities«? In the second forum, legal historians were asked to assess the »State and Perspectives of the History of Social Law«.

In the critique section, important works within legal historical research published within the last two years are discussed, several of which also deal with translation. As always, we have again done our best to discuss as many publications as possible in a language other than that in which they were written. Journals are indeed also translators.

Click here to get to the Rg website, where you will find all contributions online in open access, or you can order a hardcopy directly from the publisher.