Griet Vermeesch - The Uses of Justice in Global Perspective, 1600-1900

THE USES OF JUSTICE IN GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE, 16001900

The Uses of Justice in Global Perspective, 16001900 presents a new perspective on the uses of justice between 1600 and 1900 and confronts prevailing Eurocentric historiography in its examination of how people of this period made use of the law.

Between 1600 and 1900 the towns in Western Europe, the Kingdoms in Eastern Europe, the Empires in Asia and the Colonial States in Asia and the Americas were all characterised by a plurality of legal orders resulting from interactions and negotiations between states, institutions, and people with different backgrounds. Through exploring how justice is used within these different areas of the world, this book offers a broad global perspective, but it also adopts a fresh approach through shifting attention away from states and onto how ordinary people lived with and made use of this legal pluralism.

Containing a wealth of extensively contextualised case studies and contributing to debates on socio-legal history, processes of state formation from below, access to justice, and legal pluralism, The Uses of Justice in Global Perspective, 16001900 questions to what degree top-down imposed formal institutions were used and how, and to what degree, bottom-up crafted legal systems were crucial in allowing transactions to happen. It is ideal for students and scholars of early modern justice, crime and legal history.

Griet Vermeesch is a fellow of the Research Foundation Flanders at the Vrije Universiteit Brussels, in Belgium. Her research relates to urban history and to access to justice in the Low Countries during the early modern period.

Manon van der Heijden is Professor of Urban History at Leiden University and a member of the Academia Europaea. She is author of published Women and Crime in Early Modern Holland (2016).

Jaco Zuijderduijn is Associate Professor at the Department of Economic History at Lund University, Sweden. His main research interest is the development of economic exchange and conflict resolution. He previously published Medieval Capital Markets: Markets for Renten, State Formation and Private Investment in Holland (13001550) .

THE USES OF JUSTICE IN
GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE,
16001900

Edited by
Griet Vermeesch, Manon van der Heijden
and Jaco Zuijderduijn

First published 2019
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

2019 selection and editorial matter, Griet Vermeesch, Manon van der Heijden and Jaco Zuijderduijn; individual chapters, the contributors

The right of Griet Vermeesch, Manon van der Heijden and Jaco Zuijderduijn to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice : Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Vermeesch, Griet, editor. | Heijden, Manon van der, 1966- editor. | Zuijderduijn, C. J. (C. Jaco), editor.

Title: The uses of justice in global perspective, 1600-1900 / edited by Griet Vermeesch, Manon van der Heijden, and Jaco Zuijderduijn.

Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2019. | Includes index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018039516| ISBN 9781138476783 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781138476790 (pbk. : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: LawHistory. | Justice, Administration ofHistory. | Legal polycentricityHistory.

Classification: LCC K160 .U823 2019 | DDC 340.09/03dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018039516

ISBN: 978-1-138-47678-3 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-138-47679-0 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-02233-3 (ebk)

Typeset in Bembo
by Swales & Willis Ltd, Exeter, Devon, UK

Figures

Map

Tables

Financial support by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), Research Foundation Flanders (FWO), Leiden University, and the N.W. Posthumus Institute is gratefully acknowledged.

Elizaveta Blagodeteleva is a research fellow of the Institute for Social Policy at the National Research University Higher School of Economics in Russia. Her PhD, which she obtained in 2013 from the Moscow State Pedagogical University, examined professional group formation at the Moscow Bar Association between 1866 and 1914.

Donald Fyson is full Professor in History at the Dpartement des Sciences Historiques, at the Universit Laval, in Quebec. His expertise lies in the social, socio-legal and socio-political history of Quebec from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. He has extensively published on the history of civil and criminal justice in Quebec.

Katherine Godwin is a PhD-student at the University of Illinois where she writes a dissertation on legal culture and daily life in sixteenth-century Rouen, focusing, in particular, on civil litigation.

Philip C.C. Huang is Professor emeritus at the UCLA and has published extensively on the history of China, including a recently enlarged and updated three-volume study of civil justice from the Qing to the present, and a three-volume study on rural society and economy of the Ming and Qing.

Dries Lyna works as a lecturer at the History Department of the Radboud Universiteit in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. His current research relates to the social functions of colonial justice in the cities of Colombo, Galle and Jaffna in eighteenth-century Ceylon.

Toms A. Mantecn is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Cantabria. His main research fields relate to the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century history of violence, social inclusion and exclusion, confessional conflict, social struggles and urban history.

Alexandr Osipian is a guest scholar at the Leibniz Institute for the history and culture of Eastern Europe at the University of Leipzig. His research relates to the Armenian trading diasporas and to discourses and practices of the social construction of the past.

Bianca Premo is Associate Professor at Florida International University and researches a wide range of topics in Latin American history. Her most recent book, The Enlightenment on Trial: Ordinary Litigants and Colonialism in the Spanish Empire , is a comparative study that reveals how ordinary, often illiterate litigants made law modern in the courtrooms of vast regions of the eighteenth-century Spanish empire.

Nadeera Rupesinghe obtained her PhD in history at Leiden university, the Netherlands, in 2016 for her thesis titled Negotiating Custom: Colonial Lawmaking in the Galle Landraad. She currently works as director general of the Department of National Archives in Sri Lanka.

Alicia Schrikker is senior university lecturer at Leiden University. Her research focusses on society-state interaction in colonial contexts in Asia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Her regions of expertise are Sri Lanka, Indonesia, South Africa and India.