Book Review

Comparative/World

This is a bold, sweeping, and highly innovative book. At a time when it seems almost impossible to keep up with the breadth of monographic literature, never mind integrate historiographies written in other languages, Lauren Benton shows us not only that it is possible, but that it is vital. The sheer scale of this book, and its conceptual achievements, will make it a landmark in world history.

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Benton's subject is the ways in which empires grapple with the complexities of institutional life in settings far from the metropolis, where cultures frequently counterpose themselves to "Western" projects. Traditionally, historians had diffusionist models that saw institutionalization of social conflict radiating out from imperial hubs. Benton takes institutions seriously but turns them on their heads, showing how the makeup of legal life in colonies was shaped by myriad local forces: colonizers, subalterns, and mediators of various sorts. Try as they might—and Benton shows that this was not the uniform drive—imperial powers could not efface the compromises and syncretic mixtures that emerged on colonial grounds. Indeed, more often they gave up this effort, in part because "legal pluralism" (a portmanteau concept that runs through his book) was so functional in handling the social differences that prevailed in African, Asian, and Latin American colonies. Moreover, these differences did not stop with the differences between autochthonous peoples and Europeans but also existed among Europeans themselves, comprised of vagrants, settlers, convicts, and even conquered settlers from other European powers. In other words, the author takes seriously the idea that the fringe may have been part of empires but did not necessarily replicate imperial designs. This was so because legal relations brought communities together even as they distinguished them from each other, and the tension in turn motivated long-term legal change.

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