Law and Colonial Cultures : Legal Regimes in World History, 1400-1900 (Studies in Comparative World History)

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Summary: World History and Legal Regimes
Review: World histories are extremely difficult to do because it requires the historian to make broad, sweeping assertions about many different cultures concerning which the historian can never be an expert in each. As a specialist in Islam, I for one was sometimes left deeply dissatisfied by some of the sections focusing on Islam. This, in turn, made me question the nature of the analyses on areas concerning which I have no indepth knowledge such as in Spanish and Portugese empires.

This being said, however, the general outline presented in the book as a tendency of colonial cultures with regard to legal institutions (from multi-centric and informal to strictly state-centered and enforced with centralized compulsion) is widely corroborated and extremely helpful in grasping the evolution and centrality of legal institutions in the formation of these colonialial and, subsequently, post-colonial cutlures. The argument, therefore, makes great strides in supplementing merely economic historical accounts, such as dependency theory a la Wallerstein, with studies of colonial institutions as such and not as a mere apparatus of economic ideologies.