| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Hannes Siegrist and David Sugerman, editors. Eigentum im internationalen Vergleich (18.-20. Jahrhundert). (Kritische Studien zur Geschichtswissenschaft, number 130.) Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht. 1999. Pp. 294.

In their introduction, editors Hannes Siegrist and David Sugarman point to the tendency for legal history to operate as a separate subdiscipline, often with little sense of historical change or context. The "new legal history" pioneered in the United States has changed this. This book seeks to promote such work concerning property law in European and comparative history. The editors discuss various approaches and point to the importance and rapidly changing nature of the subject in modern times (e.g., genes, electronic images on the Internet, economic globalization, postcommunist developments). 1

The first section is concerned with property in the person and family and provides overviews mainly based on the U.S.: Morton Horwitz on changing conceptions of property and the person, and Lawrence Friedman on laws of inheritance. Two specifically modern developments render more abstract classical conceptions of property as a person/thing relationship essential for material security and spiritual dignity. One is the capacity to transfer and reproduce body parts; the other that property increasingly takes the form of claims, e.g. to state pensions, rather than control of goods separate from the person. This, along with the expansion and differentiation of potential inheritors of property, also makes inheritance law increasingly complex. . . .

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