Jane Ohlmeyer, Trinity College, Dublin, Richard J. Ross, University of Illinois, and Philip Stern, Duke University, have posted Anglicization of and through Law: British North America, Ireland, and India Compared, 1540-1800, which also appears in Journal of Modern History 98 (2026): 539-77.
Historians of British North America, Ireland, and India write, each in their own ways, about the convergence of societies in the English empire towards metropolitan models, a process generally known as “anglicization.” Yet anglicization has never been studied as a feature connecting the global British empire. Scholars typically consider a single region and seldom engage with others. We pursue a comparative approach, using law as our vantage point. Our goal is to explore anglicization of law and through law in British North America, Ireland, and India over the course of the long early modern period from the sixteenth through early nineteenth centuries. Our article begins with brief histories of anglicization in Ireland, America, and India that establish a foundation for comparison, for identifying commonalities and differences. We describe the “life cycle” or sequence of anglicization taking place upon different timelines in each of the three regions. Lest we overstate the extent of anglicization, we next consider difficulties that arise when deploying the concept. We conclude by suggesting how our project might stimulate comparative imperial history by developing categories that are portable, transferrable across place and time, and useful in studying both British overseas expansion globally and in connecting the British experience to that of other empires. Towards this end, we apply our approach to a contrast case: the Spanish empire’s fraught efforts to construct legal authority over indigenous peoples in New Spain and Peru.
--Dan Ernst