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Book Review
Canada and the United States
| Christopher L. Tomlins and Bruce H. Mann, editors. The Many Legalities of Early America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Va. 2001. Pp. ix, 466. Cloth $59.95, paper $22.50.
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| This is an unusually challenging collection of essays, because it offers so much, in quantity and complexity, and because overall it makes demands of its readers that I suspect few readers can rise to meet fully. To say all this is not to discourage anyone, but to encourage all readers to be patient, or selective, or to do whatever else it takes not to fail to reap at least some of the benefits of trying to make use of this remarkable volume. |
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This collection, edited by Christopher L. Tomlins and Bruce H. Mann, is the most important response to date to a chronic historiographical lament classically formulated by the dean of colonial American legal history, Stanley N. Katz, in "The Problem of a Colonial History" (in Colonial British America: Essays in the New History of the Early Modern Era, ed. Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole [1984]). The "problem"—really, the problems—include the question of relevance, given the transformation of the mainland British American colonies into a radically new nation, and also the historiographical inertia that still inclines more toward the study of sources and origins than the social and cultural contextualization and interpretation of law as a sociolegal phenomenon. |
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There are many more problems in arguing why and how colonial American legal history matters, and one of the valuable features of this volume is that the two presiding coeditors have differing ideas about how to approach such problems. Tomlins is an expansionist, arguing in his introduction that virtually all behaviors in all colonial cultures are related to law—or rather, to some variety of "legality." Mann, in his afterword, while hardly an anti-expansionist conceptually or geographically, is concerned not to lose sight of the integrity of "the law" per se, whether it has manifested itself in formal records, or functional institutions, or even in the conservative force of custom. |
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Generally the contributors do not offer seminal or ground-breaking research; typically, each pursues his or her previous lines of published work. There are exceptions: for example, Richard Lyman Bushman contributes an essay, on farmers' contacts with prerevolutionary North Carolina county courts, that amounts to a strikingly novel exercise in cultural anthropology. And Cornelia Hughes Dayton, in her essay on the New Haven Colony from 1639 to 1665, moves beyond her earlier descriptive work in American's women's history to offer a contribution to the typologies of patriarchy in theory and in practice, in early modern Western legal culture, and in social theory generally. |
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Nevertheless, one senses that the overall plan for this essay collection, and for the 1996 conference in Williamsburg on which the volume is based, was to present the state of the art in colonial American legal history through examples of the best ongoing work in the field. Most of the sixteen contributors are young, although established, scholars. Thus, this is a volume quintessentially about what colonial American legal history is becoming, and the thematic grouping of the essays into four respective parts is notable for what it shows and portends about current and future research agendas. |
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