Legal Pluralism and Empires, 1500–1850 ed. by Lauren Benton and Richard J. Ross

Abstract

Reviewed by: Legal Pluralism and Empires, 1500–1850 ed. by Lauren Benton and Richard J. Ross Timothy J. Fitzgerald Legal Pluralism and Empires, 1500–1850. Edited by lauren benton and richard j. ross. New York: New York University Press, 2013. 314 pp. $85.00 (cloth); $27.00 (paper). With this impressive collection of studies, Lauren Benton and Richard Ross aim to contribute to a “new narrative of world history that places empires at its center” (p. 2). More specifically, they and the assembled authors wish to front legal pluralism as an essential lens on the history of empires, and by extension global history, across the early modern period. The study of legal pluralism in imperial contexts is not new, as the editors and Paul Halliday observe in helpful introductory and concluding chapters, respectively. But the hermeneutic has gained in vigor and nuance in recent years. The crux of legal pluralism in its many settings is what the authors term “jurisdictional politics”—a rubric Benton forged over a decade ago in her landmark Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–1900 (Cambridge, 2002). A jurisdiction is “the exercise by sometimes vaguely defined legal authorities of the power to regulate and administer sanctions over particular actions or people, including groups defined by personal status, territorial boundaries, and corporate membership” (p. 6). These jurisdictions were made real by historical actors—slaves, subjects, missionaries, merchants, governors, inspectors, jurists, monarchs, and so on—who pursued their interests by fluid though mutually intelligible legal means. As such interests came into contact (and often conflict), jurisdictions might be reinforced, [End Page 897] reformed, or removed. From this perspective, the role of jurisdictional intermediaries, those who represented a mix of interests from above, below, and within (for example, a British magistrate on the island of Nevis or a Greek Orthodox patriarch in Ottoman Constantinople), assumed special salience in the exercise of empire. The benefits of this approach to imperial history, the editors suggest, include the avoidance of restrictive binaries: ruler versus ruled, state versus nonstate, public versus private, and the like. Indeed, legal pluralism’s capaciousness—its embrace of complexity, its inclusive understanding of law and legality—points to its utility. Many are granted agency. Everything is contextual. Little is static. And the material and the discursive are closely fused in generating actual, evolving historical conditions. While the book’s geographic coverage is global, stretching from Peru to New Zealand, focus is squarely on Western European imperial formations, especially as these took shape overseas. Only Karen Barkey’s chapter on the Ottoman Empire shifts attention beyond the British, French, Spanish, and, to a lesser extent, Dutch empires between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. Given the volume’s scope and aspirations, coverage of Russia, Ming/Qing China, and the Mughals is strangely absent. Nonetheless, Western Europe’s ascendancy in this period is not to be begrudged. And the studies gathered here offer fresh research and searching analysis, even when considered against the backdrop of a robust historiography of European empire. The British Empire is treated most extensively. Philip Stern argues that the empire’s famed overseas corporations were not merely political intermediaries or extensions of a centralized state but “forms of ‘commonwealth’” that performed a vast range of governing functions with considerable independence (such as collecting taxes and waging war). Here and elsewhere in the book, questions regarding legal pluralism’s impact on the nature and practice of sovereignty, including its potential divisibility, are broached. Lauren Benton and Lisa Ford examine the role of imperial magistrates in the Leeward Islands and New South Wales during the early nineteenth century and conclude that these officials were at once “the problem and the answer within the jurisdictional puzzle of the colonial legal order” (p. 189) existing among masters, slaves, and convicts. Moreover, the use of magistrates was linked to pan-imperial constitutional debates and reforms aimed at uniformity. P. G. McHugh crafts a rich study of the British presence in New Zealand, submitting that the improvisational “jurisdictionalism” of the 1830s yielded by decade’s end to the necessity of direct [End Page 898] territorial sovereignty. Put differently, the sovereignty of Maori tribal chiefs (mediated by a weak British...