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Book Review
| Lauren Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–1900, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. xiv + 285. $65 cloth (ISBN 0-521-80414-0); $20 paper (ISBN 0-521-00926-X).
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Global history, always open to new viewpoints, is the object of a rich strike in Lauren Benton's pathbreaking work. Her vehicle for this undertaking is, as its title indicates, the law as it related to colonial cultures. She contends that the cultural practices and local institutions of the indigenous peoples did not disappear in the aftermath of settlement or conquest; rather they were grafted to or coexisted with the state law imposed upon them by the colonizer. The development of such legal pluralism—the prevailing theme in this work—is hardly surprising, for early modern colonizers had ample experience with multicentric law. (She cites the coexistence of Iberian/Islamic and secular/canon law as examples.) What is new is legal pluralism's persistence in both the state-centered law of colonialism's apogee and in the post-colonial regimes as well. How this happened is cogently argued by juxtaposing the macro and the micro, that is interpreting the larger picture by employing global case histories whether from Spanish America, Europe, French West Africa, South Africa, the Ottoman world, or British India and Australia. Colonizing required control strategies. Despite the dominant power's endeavor to impose absolute political and legal authority, most often a less contentious mode, one of accommodation with indigenous institutions and practices, prevailed. Even with only minimal tension the colonizer had to contend with subtle undermining of its authority by the colonized and lots of what Benton calls "jurisdictional jockeying" (3). This process allowed colonial entities to emerge as fertile environments for legal pluralism. Benton's biggest leap is from a micro to a global construct. The author argues that this local legal sparring is key: however much legal relations varied from one colonial setting to another, these legal regimes linked disparate parts of empire and permitted transactions between imperial and colonial constituencies. Such jurisdictional interplay abetted institutional order on a global scale; moreover, it provides a pattern that enhances understanding of world history. As Benton has noted,
the example of international institutional ordering this book explores is the emergence of legal regimes in which actors immersed in different legal systems nevertheless constructed a shared understanding of legal power as a basis for exchanges of goods and information, even in the absence of an overlapping authority or a formal regulatory structure. (5)
Since her purpose is one of applying the lessons of micro legal conflicts to macro patterns of colonial rule and global institutional ordering, each chapter matches an overview of colonial legal change with examination of specific cases. This focus on local conditions rather than the spread of institutions, Benton claims, allows for understanding the "structurally similar institutional environments that constituted the global economy" (24). |
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Benton's chapters explore diverse aspects of colonial law. "Law in Diaspora," which treats early modern Atlantic polities, surveys the law of church and state in Iberia, European maritime exchange with Africa, colonial law in America, law affecting African Maroon communities in America, and law that pertained to captives and redemptionists. In "Order Out of Trouble: Jurisdictional Tensions in Catholic and Islamic Empires" Benton treats the problem as it pertained to Spanish, Portuguese, Ottoman, and Mughal empires, as well as much of Africa. Ben-ton is particularly unforgiving of those who characterize the Islamic and Christian worlds as "different civilizations" despite their similar structures of legal authority and resulting tensions. "A Place for the State: Legal Pluralism as a Colonial Project in Bengal and West Africa" cites the compromises that the British and French made in imposing a hierarchical systems of law on the customary ones of indigenous peoples. We learn here that however much Europeans dominated the legal forums, they had always to contend with local pressures and work through local cultural/legal intermediaries who compensated for the failures of the occupiers to educate their subjects and/or the unwillingness or inability of the subjects to comprehend. "Subjects and Witnesses: Cultural and Legal Hierarchies in the Cape Colonies and New South Wales" explores the weak legal pluralism that in both instances left the Khoi and Aborigines in an inferior legal status in the state-centered legal order. Benton's treatment of extraterritoriality—especially, as it pertained to Uruguay—provides still another perspective of configuring legal pluralism. |
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Benton has conceptualized an imaginative interpretation of world or global history that will serve as a focal point for those who seek to unravel its intricacies and mystery. She has argued brilliantly that "the colonial state was in no small part the product of the politics of legal ordering" (253) and that multicentric early modern empires were a prototype for the kinds of jurisdictional politics that became commonplace in colonial environments. Although the legal pluralism that evolved did so from diverse legal forums and organization, the developmental pattern was largely similar. Such congruency provides a key to making sense of a global perspective. Benton's imaginative approach is neatly packaged to provide a forum for future historians as they ponder aspects of the colonial and post-colonial worlds. |
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| Albert J. Schmidt
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The George Washington University and
Quinnipiac University College of Law |
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