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>> 1 1 Empires and Legal Pluralism Jurisdiction, Sovereignty, and Political Imagination in the Early Modern World Lauren Benton and Richard J. Ross The subject of empires is both very old and very new. An old narrative of a transition from empires to nation-states has now given way to an emphasis on the centrality and persistence of empires in world history. At the heart of this history is a recognition of the importance of legal pluralism to empires, which invariably relied on layered legal arrangements within composite polities. Empires were legally plural in their core regions as well as in their overseas or distant possessions. Many empires assembled political communities boasting divergent constitutional traditions; uneasily maintained overlapping or clashing royal, ecclesiastical, local, and seigneurial jurisdictions; and encompassed a variety of forms and sources of law. Such pluralism often grew more complex in colonies and far-flung peripheries as administrators and settlers dealt with indigenous, enslaved, and conquered peoples. The resulting legal orders encompassed multiple zones with unstable and varied relationships to one another and to imperial centers. Colonial administrators and jurists studied legal pluralism without using the term. Officials and settlers described plural institutions and practices in order to guide rulers and, sometimes, to question the justice of empire itself. The Spanish scholastic Francisco de Vitoria, for example, in the process of criticizing the conduct of Spain in the New World, developed legal rationales for European conquest and colonization that balanced Castilian and indigenous rights and jurisdictions.1 Juan de Solórzano Pereira and Thomas Pownall were 2 > 3 the degree of imperial influence on processes formerly regarded as the keys to national legal development—from currents in constitutionalism to the legal underpinnings of sovereignty. The emergence of new regional fields, meanwhile , especially the rise of Atlantic and Indian Ocean history, stimulated questions about the legal foundations of inter-imperial and global regimes.8 These and other projects gave new relevance—and a different spin—to the decades-old concept of “legal pluralism.” Historians began to take seriously the idea that changes in the plural legal order constituted an important piece of the narrative about the shifting international order. This perspective has led to studies of the ways in which jurisdictional conflicts spurred shifts in the structure of plural legal orders, contributing, for example, to the formation of the colonial state or to “settler sovereignty.”9 Some scholars have reframed colonial legal history as a narrative of multiple and fluid imperial constitutions.10 Still others have sought to locate debates about “rights” in the context of jurisdictionally complex imperial law, or have followed metropolitan legal practices through new variations on the edges of empire.11 We can now profitably take stock of these approaches to legal pluralism and empires—and also begin to look beyond initial contributions. This volume seeks to advance the field both by identifying new research directions and by connecting historical studies to broadly defined questions about the nature of law and legal politics in empires. The volume’s essays enrich understandings of imperial sovereignty; analyze the legal strategies of conquered subjects, slaves, and religious minorities; probe the relation between legal pluralism and inter-imperial law; and investigate circulating ideas about legal pluralism. Many of the chapters reflect a view of legal pluralism that emphasizes its rootedness in jurisdictional politics. Some chapters explore historical actors’ uses of political and religious thought to structure, justify, or undermine plural legal regimes. Jurisdictional conflicts and the strategic manipulation of ideas and information about legal pluralism are shown to have worked together in shaping the history of empires. Imperial law represented a medium of politics at the same time that it reflected ways of representing order, authority, and rights that changed more slowly and provided participants in legal disputes with a durable, if flexible, resource. Jurisdictional vs. Normative Legal Pluralism The concept of legal pluralism comes with a troubled past. Social scientists and legal scholars have struggled with the term’s definition, vying to capture the structural relation of multiple spheres of law while also recognizing the porousness of such spheres and the fluidity of institutional arrangements. 4 > 5 figures in opposition to “nonstate” law. Consider the common assertion that state law descended or was imposed on “other” law in linear and consistent ways across several centuries. Moore’s careful description of “semiautonomous social fields” as law-like, for example, contrasted sharply with her rendering of state law as expanding and converting customary law into a colonial “residue.”19 Tamanaha insists...

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