Abstract

This book explores the changing structures and processes of legal pluralism as well as the many different ways of imagining and describing legal pluralism in empires. It considers the complex and contingent configuration of imperial law as a set of fluid institutional and cultural practices rather than a structure of command. It discusses imperial sovereignty as well as the legal strategies of conquered subjects, slaves, and religious minorities and examines the connection between legal pluralism and inter-imperial law and between legal pluralism and jurisdictional politics. It also investigates how political and religious thought were used to structure, justify, or undermine plural legal regimes and how jurisdictional conflicts and the strategic manipulation of ideas and information about legal pluralism have shaped the history of empires. This introductory chapter assesses some of the problems that have hampered the dominant approaches to the subject of legal pluralism and proposes an alternative perspective that defines legal pluralism as a formation of historically occurring patterns of jurisdictional complexity and conflict.

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