CFP: Law and Literature From the Global South

[Via H-Law we have the following CFP.]

The Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies, Spring 2018 Special Issue: Law and Literature from the Global South.  Guest Editors: David Babcock (James Madison University) and Peter Leman (Brigham Young University).  Deadline for Submissions (approximately 4,000-5,000 words): December 20, 2016.

The editors of this special issue of JCPCS seek essays that respond to the question: what does it mean to study law and literature from the global south? “Law and Literature,” as a field, has responded in recent years to criticism of its longstanding attention to Anglo-American contexts, and more and more, scholars are turning to regions of the global south in thinking about the literary in relationship to international, colonial, and post-colonial forms of law. Though this widening geographical scope is praiseworthy and necessary, there remains the question of method: can the literatures and legal cultures of the global south inflect, augment, or otherwise reshape not only where we direct our critical attention as scholars of law and literature but how?

In posing this question, we take as initial inspiration Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff’s Theory From the South (2012), in which they question the tendency of theory work to be unidirectional, emerging from the north and then circulating within and being “applied to” the south. If, however, the global south has played an essential role in “world-historical processes” (7) and can, therefore, afford “privileged insight into the workings of the world at large” (1), then perhaps theory—including law and literature—ought to take this into account. When we speak of “postcolonial law and literature” or “law, literature, and the global south,” are we speaking of the conventional critical paradigms of law and literature as it emerged from Anglo-American contexts in the 1970s and 80s, or does the postcolonial/global open us up to new configurations of the legal and the literary? If so, what might these configurations look like? What new concepts emerge? Are there forms of law, justice, obligation, harm, personhood, etc. that originate in but circulate beyond the cultures of the global south that might provoke us to think differently about the dominant normative assumptions of the field at large? Are there colonial legal practices that still survive in contemporary states, and if so, what creative concepts or images of law can we see emerging in literary responses to these problematic legacies? In what ways has international law been adapted, reimagined, or otherwise modified in its years of deployment throughout the global south—for good or for ill—that can be understood through the lens of the literary and brought back to our conventional assumptions about law as it has developed in the north? Are there forms of intersection between law and literature in the global south that make even the implied distinction of “and” irrelevant? Submissions should seek to demonstrate how the literatures and cultures of the global south, broadly conceived, offer provocative ways for scholars throughout the world to think about the field of law and literature and the fluid nature of its most fundamental terms.

Manuscripts must be written in English and follow the MLA Style Manual. JCPCS uses a double-blind review process. Full, formatted manuscripts should be submitted to jcpcs.lawlit@gmail.com by December 20, 2016.

Funk on Church Corporations and Conflict of Laws

Kellen R. Funk, a doctoral candidate in history at Princeton University, has posted “Interference in Churches Must Be Referred to the Rights of Property”: Church Corporations and Conflict of Laws in Antebellum America, which is forthcoming in the Journal of Law and Religion 33 (2018)::    

Scholars frequently describe American religious disestablishment using commercial analogies, reckoning that states “privatized” religion or subjected churches to “free market competition” by making them more like commercial businesses, yet churches pioneered many of the corporate devices that came to define American enterprise after the Civil War. Such descriptions are thus anachronistic. Antebellum jurists were not concerned about the similarity of churches to businesses but rather their similarity to states, and the republican fear that churches could be rival sovereign states at first structured the law of disestablishment. In most states, churches gained rights of general incorporation but faced significant limitations on their corporate governance and property holdings. After the Marshall Court reasoned that churches did not govern and should not be considered rival sovereignties, state judges were left without a definite source of law to adjudicate church disputes. Given the vagueness of charters under general incorporation schemes, state courts allowed trust law to function as a conflict of law analysis: Judges treated religious doctrine as a foreign legal system with rules that could be ascertained and accorded respect in American courts. Such a move created a positive, corporate right of religious liberty that becomes obscured if one conceives of religious freedom only as an individual right to be asserted against the state.

Kang on Holmes's Martial Manliness

John M. Kang, St. Thomas University School of Law, has posted Prove Yourselves: Oliver Wendell Holmes and the Obsessions of Manliness, which will appear in the West Virginia Law Review 118 (2016): 1067-1129,

OWH in uniform, 1861 (wiki)

In order for constitutional democracy to endure, Americans must be tough, must be manly—and indeed heroic; or so Oliver Wendell Holmes argued, the famous justice who, in his mid-twenties, was also a thrice wounded veteran of the Civil War.

Holmes is often wrongly portrayed as a social Darwinist or as a political progressive sympathetic to workers or even as a prototypical liberal softy of sorts. Notwithstanding his own words, there were few bases for these accounts. Holmes’s most important opinions dealing with First Amendment were impelled by an idiosyncratic idea of manliness, and in particular, a view of manliness that was derived from his account of martial heroism. He argued that only a manly people who embraced his own brand of heroism could endure the frightening consequences that would be ushered by the political freedom protected by the First Amendment. Only such a heroic people, that is, could tolerate conditions where communists, anarchists, and other subversives threatened to destroy the United States.

Whittington on Judicial Review by the US Supreme Court

Keith E. Whittington, Princeton University, Department of Political Science, has posted Sober Second Thoughts: Evaluating the History of Horizontal Judicial Review by the U.S. Supreme Court, which is forthcoming in Constitutional Studies:

Normative theorizing about judicial review often proceeds with minimal attention to the overall record of how the U.S. Supreme Court has actually exercised the power of judicial review. This article assesses how well the historical record of the Court’s invalidation of federal policies can be justified using only a minimalist theory of judicial review. Although some of the Court’s cases can be justified in this way, most of the Court’s work would require a more substantively thick and necessarily controversial theory in order to justify it.

Shammas and Mancall on the Sea

An edited volume by Peter C. Mancall and Carole Shammas (both of the University of Southern California), Governing the Sea in the Early Modern Era:Essays in Honor of Robert C. Ritchie (Huntington Library) came out last year. From the publisher:

Early modern European governments clashed over laws governing the sea—an environment that featured watery borders, rampant piracy, the threat of free trade, and the large-scale transportation of human cargo. The essays in this volume explore how the exploitation of the oceans changed the institution of slavery, long-distance trade, property crime, the environment, literature, and memory, from medieval times to the nineteenth century.

The Table of Contents is available here, and here is further information about the book.

Zhao on Sorcery Crimes in Traditional China

Xiaohuan Zhao, University of Sydney, Department of Chinese Studies, has posted Sorcery Crimes, Laws, and Judicial Practice in Traditional China, which appears in the Australian Journal of Asian Law 17 (2016): 1-21:

Wugu is a general term for all sorts of black magic in China, just as ‘sorcery’ or ‘witchcraft’ is understood in a Western context. Wugu sorcery is a living tradition that has been practised for more than 3,000 years and has been strictly prohibited and severely punished since ancient times. This study will examine rules and punishments laid out against sorcery crimes in traditional China from the pre-Qin (221-206 BC) period through to the Qing dynasty (1644-1911), followed by a case study of relevant judicial practice. I argue that sorcery was treated primarily as a heretical or political crime in early and early medieval China, before politically motivated sorcery crimes were distinguished from non-politically motivated ones. The distinction made between them led to a sharp drop in political sorcery charges and trials in China’s later dynasties but did not do much to prevent miscarriage of justice from occurring from time to time, mainly due to wide judicial discretion, lack of specific legal penalties, and the absence of effective means of gathering and verifying evidence.

Three More from Hulsebosch

Daniel J. Hulsebosch, New York University School of Law, has posted three more articles, either just out or forthcoming.  Professor Hulsebosch presented Magna Carta for the World? The Merchants’ Chapter and Foreign Capital in the Early American Republic  in that Carolina Law symposium on Magna Carta.  (The paper is downloadable not through SSRN but here, as part of volume 94 of the North Carolina Law Review.)

This Article examines the early modern revival and subtle transformation in what is here called the merchants’ chapter of Magna Carta and then analyzes how lawyers, judges, and government officeholders invoked it in the new American federal courts and in debates over congressional power. In the U.S. Supreme Court in the early 1790s, a British creditor and an American State debated the meaning and applicability of the merchants’ chapter, which guaranteed two rights to foreign merchants: free entry and exit during peacetime, without being subjected to arbitrary taxes; and, in wartime, the promise that their persons and goods would not be harmed or confiscated, unless their own king attacked and confiscated English merchants. In other words, no harm to enemy aliens, except as retaliation. Tit for tat.

The idea that reciprocity was a fundamental mechanism of international (and interpersonal) relations became something like a social science axiom in the early modern Enlightenment. Edward Coke claimed to find that mechanism in the merchants’ chapter and publicized it to lawyers throughout the emerging British Empire and beyond. Montesquieu lauded the English for protecting foreign commerce in their fundamental law, and Blackstone basked in that praise. American lawyers derived their understanding of the merchants’ chapter from these sources and then, in the early Republic, stretched the principle behind it to protect foreign capital, not just resident merchants. The vindication of old imperial debt contracts would signal to all international creditors that, in the United States, credit was safe. Federalists then invoked the chapter outside of the courts to resist Republican attempts to embargo commerce and sequester foreign credit. For Republicans, doux commerce had become the Achilles heel of the great Atlantic empires: their reliance on American trade could be used to gain diplomatic leverage without risking war. For Federalists, economic sanctions threatened not just their fiscal policy but their entire vision of an Atlantic world that increasingly insulated international capital from national politics. They all agreed, however, that the role of foreign capital in the American constitutional system was a central issue for the new and developing nation.

A second article is Exile, Choice, and Loyalism: Taking and Restoring Dignity in the American Revolution, which is to appear in a symposium on “Dignity Takings,” in Law & Social Inquiry (2016):    

Taking a cue from Bernadette Atuahene’s concept of “dignity takings” and her insight that government expropriation inflicts more than economic injury, this essay analyzes how American revolutionaries defined political membership, penalized and expropriated British loyalists, and then allowed some to join the American polity in the decade after the Revolution. Many recovered their property, professions, and legal privileges. However, because most loyalists could choose to remain loyal or join the Revolution, they did not lose human dignity as Atuahene defines it. Case studies of two reintegrating lawyers, Richard Harison and William Rawle, explore loyalism, the loss of dignities that loyalists suffered, and some paths toward reintegration. Their appointment as federal attorneys helped make the government conversant in the common law, British statutes, and the law of nations, which in turn supported the Federalist goal of reintegrating the United States into the Atlantic World: achieving, in other words, national dignity.

The third is English Liberties Outside England: Floors, Doors, Windows, and Ceilings in the Legal Architecture of Empire, which is forthcoming as Chapter 38 of the Oxford History of English Law and Literature 1500-1700, ed. Lorna Hutson:

We tend to think of global migration and the problem of which legal rights people enjoy as they cross borders as modern phenomena. They are not. The question of emigrant rights was one of the foundational issues in what can be called the constitution of the English empire at the beginning of transatlantic colonization in the seventeenth century. This essay analyzes one strand of this constitutionalism, a strand captured by the resonant term, ‘the liberties and privileges of Englishmen’. Almost every colonial grant – whether corporate charter, royal charter, or proprietary grant – for roughly two dozen imagined, projected, failed, and realized overseas ventures contained a clause stating that the emigrants would enjoy the liberties, privileges and immunities of English subjects. The clause was not invented for transatlantic colonization. Instead, it had medieval roots. Accordingly, royal drafters, colonial grantees, and settlers penned and read these guarantees against the background of traditional interpretations about what they meant.

Soon, however, the language of English liberties and privileges escaped the founding documents, and contests over these keywords permeated legal debates on the meaning and effects of colonization. Just as the formula of English liberties and privileges became a cornerstone of England’s constitutional monarchy, it also became a foundation of the imperial constitution. As English people brought the formula west, they gave it new meanings, and then they returned with it to England and created entirely new problems.

Liberties and privileges claims fell into five functional categories. First, the claim that colonists abroad and their descendants enjoyed English liberties functioned as an open door, allowing overseas colonists to return home to England and be treated as equal English subjects. Second, the king or his colonial deputies might make positive grants of English liberties to subjects in a royal territory outside England as an inducement for English subjects to migrate there. Here, the grant of English liberties and privileges functioned as a window, a transparent promise of familiar and cherished rights to encourage settlement. Third, already by the time of the English Civil War and more frequently by century’s end, the colonists themselves sometimes claimed English liberties, privileges, and immunities abroad as a floor below which governors could not push. Fourth, in the reverse of the second, the claim that overseas subjects had to be governed according to English standards, including English liberties and privileges, could function as a ceiling on colonial innovation. It was a ceiling measured by metropolitan officials, especially the Privy Council as it reviewed colonial statutes and judicial cases to ensure that they were, in the familiar language of colonial grants, ‘agreeable’ with and ‘not repugnant’ to the laws of England. Finally, colonial assumptions of English liberties functioned as a mirror through which colonists could see themselves as English, even when their colonial rights, such as their property rights, were viewed at home as peculiar. If for example a subject of the English king in an overseas dominion owned slaves in that dominion and wished to sojourn home, could he bring his slaves? Could he carry the rights of a Virginian or Jamaican with him to England and enjoy those rights there? Collapsing English and local liberties, slaveholders argued affirmatively. As Englishmen they should, they thought, be able to move around the empire with their property, including human property.

Ruparelia on Socioeconomic Rights and the Indian Supreme Court

Sanjay Ruparelia, New School for Social Research, Department of Politics, has posted A Progressive Juristocracy? The Unexpected Social Activism of India's Supreme Court:

Since 2005, India has introduced a series of progressive social acts that legislate a right to various socioeconomic entitlements. These range from information, work, and education to forest conservation, food, and public service. Three features distinguish these acts: the explicit use of rights-based claims; the design of innovative governance mechanisms that seek to enhance the transparency, responsiveness, and accountability of the state; and the role played by social activists and activist judges in spearheading these pieces of legislation with the help of progressive party politicians. This paper analyzes a key slow-burning stimulus of India’s new rights-based welfare paradigm: the socially activist turn of its Supreme Court. I address two main questions. First, what explains the rise of progressive socioeconomic jurisprudence in India in the late 1970s? Following the prevailing scholarly consensus, I analyze the role of antecedent conditions and particular causal mechanisms to explain high judicial activism in India: deepening political fragmentation, endogenous judicial change, and the strategic political retreat of elected representatives. None of these factors can fully explain the timing, sequence, and focus of the social activist turn of the Indian Supreme Court in the late 1970s, however, which owed much to the rise of popular social formations during these years and their proliferation in the 1980s. Thus the complex interaction effects of several causal factors, whose weight has differed over time, provides a more convincing explanation. Second, what have been the achievements and failures of high judicial activism in India regarding socioeconomic rights? As many scholars persuasively demonstrate, its direct impact has been limited, while its pro-poor posture has been inconsistent. However, by focusing excessively on direct material consequences in the short-run, these studies discount the powerful long-term ramifications, many of which are symbolic and indirect, of the Indian Supreme Court’s earlier progressive turn.

H/t: Legal Theory Blog

CFP: A&NZ Law and History Society, 2016

[Via H-Law, we have the following announcement.  Note the deadline of July 29.]

The 35th Annual Australia and New Zealand Law and History Society Conference will be held at the Curtin Law School, Perth City Building on Monday 5 to 7 December 2016. This year's conference is entitled: 'Echoes on the Periphery: The Transformation of British Law in Africa and the Asia-Pacific'. This conference focuses on how the law changed to address the local conditions of the peoples and settlers in the British Empire in the 19th and 20th centuries. The foundation of colonies and societies in Africa, Asia, Australasia and in the British Empire generally was a chaotic affair. Before the effective extension of state authority and jurisdiction across the territories, various settler and local populations interacted across a range of customary, informal, colonial and imperial legal orders. The disputes among these groups not only involved fundamental economic interests but also were about competing political and legal philosophies regarding the nature and extent of developing colonial and national states. This conference seeks to investigate the law and rules that arose from this colonial milieu: an amalgam of the colonial and imperial law, the informal law of the Anglo-settlers and the law of local and indigenous societies in the colonial territory, all of which gradually coalesced into the colonial and national states which exist today.

The theme for this conference is intended to be interpreted broadly and abstracts of papers on any legal history topic are welcome. Scholars and post-graduate students, particularly in the Asian, African and Pacific region, are encouraged to submit abstracts for consideration by the conference organisers. Abstracts will be selected on the basis of quality, relevance and originality of ideas. Presenters whose abstracts are accepted will be required to meet their own travel, accommodation and conference registration costs. Postgraduate students enrolled in an Australian or New Zealand university may apply for a Kercher Scholarship to assist with their attendance. Other postgraduate students may apply for similar funding from the Curtin Law School, directly to the conference convenors.

The deadline for submission of abstracts is Friday 29 July 2016. Abstracts of no more than 300 words should be contained in a Microsoft Word document and submitted via email to: ANZLHS2016@curtin.edu.au.

Georgetown's International History Seminar

[We have the following announcement.]

The Georgetown University Institute for Global History and the Mortara Center for International Studies present the 2016-17 International History Seminar

Conveners: Toshihiro Higuchi, John McNeill, David Painter, and Aviel Roshwald

The seminar will meet on Tuesdays, 5:30-7:00 in the Mortara Center for International Studies at the corner of N and 36th Streets, NW (3600 N St., Washington, DC).  Papers will be pre-circulated among participants, on the understanding that they are drafts, and not to be quoted from or cited without author's permission. Light refreshments will be served.

September 13: Patricia O'Brien (Australian National University), "European Disarmament, Militarization in the Pacific and the Inner Workings of the League of Nations: The Case of New Zealand and Its S moan Mandate"

October 4: Kurk Dorsey (University of New Hampshire), "The 1972 US-Soviet Grain Deal: The Unintended Environmental Consequences of Trading with the Enemy"

November 15: Laura Beers (American University), "The Women's International League for Peace and Freedom" 

January 17: Sheldon Garon (Princeton University), "On the Transnational Destruction of Cities: What Japan and the U.S. Learned from the Bombing of Britain and Germany in World War II" 

March 21: Xiaoyuan Liu (University of Virginia), "Party Narrative and the Reform War in the Sichuan-Tibetan Frontier in the 1950s"

April 18: Tyler Priest (University of Iowa), "The Deepwater Golden Triangle: The Gulf of Mexico, Brazil, and West Africa in the Global Oil Economy"

Adkins's "Making Modern Florida"

It’s the official publication date for Making Modern Florida: How the Spirit of Reform Shaped a New State Constitution (University Press of Florida), by Mary E Adkins, University of Florida Levin College of Law:

Mid-twentieth-century Florida was a state in flux. Its explosive growth could be seen in rapidly burgeoning cities and suburbs, the development of the Kennedy Space Center during the space race, and the impending construction of Walt Disney World. Florida’s antiquated 1885 constitution was no match for the dramatic changes that took place in the makeup of the state during this time.

Many people recognized the shortcomings of the old constitution and worked to overhaul it. However, a small group of rural legislators known as the “Pork Chop Gang” controlled the state and thwarted several attempts to modernize the constitution. But through court-imposed redistribution of legislators and the hard work of state leaders, the constitution was modernized and the executive branch was reorganized.

In Making Modern Florida, Mary Adkins goes behind the scenes to examine the history and impact of the 1966–68 revision of the Florida state constitution. With storytelling flair, Adkins uses interviews and detailed analysis of speeches and transcripts to vividly capture the moves, gambits, and backroom moments necessary to create and introduce a new state constitution. This carefully researched account brings to light the constitutional debates and political processes in the growth to maturity of what is now the nation’s third largest state.

Endorsements after the jump:

Hillman to Lead Mills College

Congratulations to legal historian Elizabeth L. Hillman, late of UC Hastings Law, who earlier this month began her tenure as the fourteenth president of Mills College.  President Hillman earned a PhD in history and JD at Yale University, the author of Defending America: Military Culture and the Cold War Court-Martial (Princeton University Press, 2005), and a former LHB Guest Blogger!  Mills's press release is here.  H/t: SBG

Hulsebosch on Navigability and the Transformation of the Common Law

Daniel J. Hulsebosch, New York University School of Law, has posted a very nice article from his backlist, Writs to Rights: 'Navigability' and the Transformation of the Common Law in the Nineteenth Century, which originally appeared in the Cardozo Law Review 23 (2002).:

This Article argues that nationalist jurists in the early nineteenth century attempted to replace the dominant procedural conception of the common law with a substantive one. Their purpose was to ameliorate the effects of legal federalism. They hoped that the creation of a national body of private law in treatises and judicial reports would encourage legal uniformity among the states. The re-orientation of waterway law around the keyword “navigability” offers one example. As this example demonstrates, the project of forging a national jurisprudence was not entirely successful. But it did, indirectly, generate a way for the Supreme Court to extend its admiralty jurisdiction beyond tidewater and onto the nation’s navigable fresh waters, thereby subjecting many commercial cases to a uniform and notionally transnational body of maritime law.

Moyn on the History of International Criminal Law

Samuel Moyn, Harvard University, has posted From Aggression to Atrocity: Rethinking the History of International Criminal Law, which is forthcoming in the Oxford Handbook of International Criminal Law:    

Explaining the shift from the priority of the charge of "aggression" in the beginning of the field of international criminal law to its exclusion in the age of the its reinvention around a suite of atrocity charges is the central task for historians in understanding this domain — and it also should matter for observers of the world today. Yet routinely, international criminal law is presented as running through a smooth trajectory, rather than a stark reversal or at least massive shift. For this reason, this essay gathers together elements for a case for the transformation in the first place, and floats some hypotheses about its timing and causes.

Sager, "Marital Cruelty in Antebellum America"

New from Louisiana State University Press: Marital Cruelty in Antebellum America, by Robin C. Sager (University of Evansville). A description from the Press:

In Marital Cruelty in Antebellum America, Robin C. Sager probes the struggles ofaggrieved spouses shedding light on the nature of marriage and violence in the United States in the decades prior to the Civil War. Analyzing over 1,500 divorce records that reveal intimate details of marriages in conflict in Virginia, Texas, and Wisconsin from 1840–1860, Sager offers a rare glimpse into the private lives of ordinary Americans shaken by accusations of cruelty.

At a time when the standard for an ideal marriage held that both partners adequately perform their respective duties, hostility often arose from ongoing domestic struggles for power. Despite a rise in the then novel expectation of marriage as a companionate relationship, and even in the face of liberalized divorce grounds, marital conflicts often focused on violations of duty, not lack of love. Sager describes how, in this environment, cruelty was understood as a failure to fulfill expectations and as a weapon to brutally enforce more traditional interpretations of marital duty. 

Sager’s findings also challenge historical literature’s assumptions about the regional influences on violence, showing that married southerners were no more or less violent than their midwestern counterparts. Her work reveals how definitions and perceptions of cruelty varied according to the gender of victim and perpetrator. Correcting historical mischaracterizations of women’s violence as trivial, rare, or defensive, Sager finds antebellum wives both capable and willing to commit a wide variety of cruelties within their marriages. Her research provides details about the reality of nineteenth-century conjugal unions, including the deep unhappiness buried within them.

More information is available here.

Sunday Book Roundup

This week's roundup is heterogenous and lengthy - hopefully there's something for legal historians of all stripes.

In this week's New York Times Lisa McGirr reviews Neither Snow nor Rain: A History of the United States Postal Service by Devin Leonard and How the Post Office Created America: A History by Winifred Gallagher.  (Leonard and Gallagher's books are also reviewed in the Washington Post.)

The summer issue of Dissent includes a number of provocative reviews (and the article "How War
Lost its Politics" by LHB founder Mary Dudziak).  Jonathan Levy has a review and meditation on Jefferson Cowie's The Great Exception: The New Deal and the Limits of American Politics and Robert J. Gordon's The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War. Levy's review is behind the paywall but it is well worth a read.

Also in Dissent is a review of Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City.  Finally, Gabriel Winant has an evocative review of No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity by Sarah Haley and Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South by Talitha L. LeFlouria.

H-Net has posted reviews of a few books we've previously announced: Mari N. Crabtree on Talitha LeFlouria's Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South, Ellen Pearson on Ted Maris-Wolf's Family Bonds, Brittany Gilmer on Emily Burrill's States of Marriage, and Amrita Shodhan on (LHB blogger) Mitra Sharafi's Law and Identity in Colonial South Asia.

This month's The Federal Lawyer includes a brief review of Susanna Blumenthal's Law and the Modern Mind: Consciousness and Responsibility in American Legal Culture.  

The New Yorker has published a review essay of Mitchell Duneier's Ghetto: The Invention of a Place, the History of an Idea.

The New Books Network has a couple of interviews of possible interest.  One is with Sabine Arnaud and is about her new book On Hysteria: The Invention of a Medical Category between 1670 and 1820.  Adam Mendelsohn is also interviewed about his The Rag Race: How Jews Sewed Their Way to Success in America and the British Empire.

This week's Guardian includes a review of Eric Hobsbawm's Viva La Revolución.  Also in the Guardian is a review of Philippe Sand's East West Street: On the Origins of "Genocide" and "Crimes Against Humanity".  East West Street also received a review at The Irish Times.

In the Times Literary Supplement is a review of Pamela Haag's The Gunning of America: Business and the Making of American Gun Culture.

NPR interviews Linda Greenhouse about her and Michael Graetz's The Burger Court and the Rise of the Judicial Right. (The book also receives mention as a "nonfiction book not to be missed" over at the Los Angeles Times.)  NPR also interviews Nancy Isenberg on her White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America 

The New Republic also engages with Nancy Isenberg's White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America.

History News Network has a review of The Last Great Strike:  Little Steel, the CIO, and the Struggle for Labor Rights in New Deal America by Ahmed White.

And finally, in The New Rambler Review is a review of Adultery: Infidelity and the Law by law professor Deborah Rhode.

Weekend Roundup

•  SCOTUSblogger Andrew Hamm has a nice post on the Holmes Devise and the series' new editor, Maeva Marcus.  H/t: BS

•  Over at the World Legal History Blog, Nurfadzilah Yahaya shares highlights from the "Roundtable on How to Study Religion in Times of Crisis" at the National University of Singapore's Asia Research Institute on June 28, 2016. Anna Su (University of Toronto) spoke on law and religion, and particularly on America's export of religious freedom during the twentieth century. We announced her book, Exporting Freedom: Religious Liberty and American Power recently. 

• Water and the Making of Place in North America, a graduate student conference sponsored by the Program in American Studies, Princeton University October 14-15, 2016.

• ICYMI: At the Faculty Lounge, Al Brophy noted the publication of that symposium on Magna Carta at Carolina Law, now on-line in the North Carolina Law Review.

Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers.

Danner on "Case Lawyers"

Richard A. Danner, the Rufty Research Professor of Law and Senior Associate Dean for Information Services at the Duke University School of Law, has posted Cases and Case-Lawyers, which is forthcoming in volume 35 of the Legal Reference Services Quarterly.

In the nineteenth century, the term “case-lawyer” was used as a label for lawyers who seemed to care more about locating precedents applicable to their current cases than understanding the principles behind the reported case law. Criticisms of case-lawyers appeared in English journals in the late 1820s, then in the United States, usually from those who believed that every lawyer needed to know and understand the unchanging principles of the common law in order to resolve issues not found in the reported cases. After the Civil War, expressions of concern about case-lawyers increased with the significant growth in the amount of published law after private companies entered the legal publishing market. By the turn of the twentieth century, it was generally acknowledged that the number of cases had made it impossible for attorneys not to focus on locating precedents. Later in the century most references to case-lawyers were historical, even as the amount of published law facing lawyers continued to grow. Professor Danner examines legal periodicals and other sources to explore the connection between the growth in numbers of published cases and reporters, and hostility toward case-lawyers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Global Perspectives on Legal History 4

[We have the following announcement.]

With Spatial and Temporal Dimensions for Legal History. Research Experiences and Itineraries, the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History presents the sixth volume in its book series “Global Perspectives on Legal History,” edited and published by the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History, Frankfurt am Main, Germany.  As its title suggests, the series is designed to advance the scholarly research of legal historians worldwide who seek to transcend the established boundaries of national legal scholarship that typically sets the focus on a single, dominant modus of normativity and law. The series aims to privilege studies dedicated to reconstructing the historical evolution of normativity from a global perspective.  It includes monographs, editions of sources, and collaborative works. All titles in the series are available both as premium print-on-demand and in the open-access format.  More information on the series and forthcoming volumes is [here].

Massimo Meccarelli, María Julia Solla Sastre (eds.)  Spatial and Temporal Dimensions for Legal History : Research Experiences and Itineraries, Global Perspectives on Legal History 6.  Frankfurt am Main: Max Planck Institute for European Legal History 2016. 300 p., € 14,99 D.  ISBN: 978-3-944773-05-6.  Open Access Online Edition.  Print-on-demand.

The spatiotemporal conjunction is a fundamental aspect of the juridical reflection on the historicity of law. Despite the fact that it seems to represent an issue directly connected with the question of where legal history is heading today, it still has not been the object of a focused inquiry. Against this background, the book's proposal consists in rethinking key confluences related to this problem in order to provide coordinates for a collective understanding and dialogue.

The aim of this volume, however, is not to offer abstract methodological considerations, but rather to rely both on concrete studies, out of which a reflection on this conjunction emerges, as well as on the reconstruction of certain research lines featuring a spatiotemporal component.

This analytical approach makes a contribution by providing some suggestions for the employment of space and time as coordinates for legal history. Indeed, contrary to those historiographical attitudes reflecting a monistic conception of space and time (as well as a Eurocentric approach), the book emphasises the need for a delocalized global perspective. In general terms, the essays collected in this book intend to take into account the multiplicity of the spatiotemporal confines, the flexibility of those instruments that serve to create chronologies and scenarios, as well as certain processes of adaptation of law to different times and into different spaces.

The spatiotemporal dynamism enables historians not only to detect new perspectives and dimensions in foregone themes, but also to achieve new and compelling interpretations of legal history. As far as the relationship between space and law is concerned, the book analyses experiences in which space operates as a determining factor of law, e.g. in terms of a field of action for law. Moreover, it outlines the attempted scales of spatiality in order to develop legal historical research. With reference to the connection between time and law, the volume sketches the possibility of considering the factor of time, not just as a descriptive tool, but as an ascriptive moment (quasi an inner feature) of a legal problem, thus making it possible to appreciate the synchronic aspects of the ‘juridical experience'.

As a whole, the volume aims to present spatiotemporality as a challenge for legal history. Indeed, reassessing the value of the spatiotemporal coordinates for legal history implies thinking through both the thematic and methodological boundaries of the discipline.

Gunneflo, "Targeted Killing: A Legal and Political History"

New from Cambridge University Press: Targeted Killing: A Legal and Political History (May 2016), by Markus Gunneflo (Lunds Universitet, Sweden). A description from the Press:

Looking beyond the events of the second intifada and 9/11, this book reveals how targeted killing is intimately embedded in both Israeli and US statecraft, and in the problematic relationship between sovereign authority and lawful violence underpinning the modern state system. It details the legal and political issues raised in targeted killing as it has emerged in practice, including questions of domestic constitutional authority, the use of force in international law, the law of belligerent occupation, the law of targeting and human rights law. The distinctive nature of Israeli and US targeted killing is analysed in terms of the compulsion of legality characteristic of the liberal constitutional state, a compulsion that demands the ability to distinguish between legal 'targeted killing' and extra-legal 'political assassination'. The effect is a highly legalized framework for the extraterritorial killing of designated terrorists that may significantly affect the international law of force.

More information is available here.

Su on the Export of Religious Liberty

Earlier this year, Anna Su, University of Toronto, published Exporting Freedom: Religious Liberty and American Power (Harvard University Press). From the publisher: 

Religious freedom is widely recognized today as a basic human right, guaranteed by nearly all national constitutions. Exporting Freedom charts the rise of religious freedom as an ideal firmly enshrined in international law and shows how America’s promotion of the cause of individuals worldwide to freely practice their faith advanced its ascent as a global power. 

Anna Su traces America’s exportation of religious freedom in various laws and policies enacted over the course of the twentieth century, in diverse locations and under a variety of historical circumstances. Influenced by growing religious tolerance at home and inspired by a belief in the United States’ obligation to protect the persecuted beyond its borders, American officials drafted constitutions as part of military occupations—in the Philippines after the Spanish–American War, in Japan following World War II, and in Iraq after 2003. They also spearheaded efforts to reform the international legal order by pursuing Wilsonian principles in the League of Nations, drafting the United Nations Charter, and signing the Helsinki Accords during the Cold War. The fruits of these labors are evident in the religious freedom provisions in international legal instruments, regional human rights conventions, and national constitutions. 

In examining the evolution of religious freedom from an expression of the civilizing impulse to the democratization of states and, finally, through the promotion of human rights, Su offers a new understanding of the significance of religion in international relations.

Some blurbs: 

“Exporting Freedom makes a valuable and important contribution both to the scholarship and to a pressing, ongoing public conversation about the appropriate role of the United States in securing and protecting religious liberty abroad. The book usefully contextualizes the development of human-rights law and policy dealing with religious liberty and, in so doing, helps to refute—or at least to complicate—the view that American policymakers’ solicitude for religious liberty abroad is, and always has been, cynical or disingenuous.” -Richard W. Garnett 

“Exporting Freedom draws attention to a significant but under-examined topic: religious liberty in U.S. foreign policy. This fascinating book will add to our understanding of both religion in international relations and the history of America in the world.”-Andrew Preston

We noted this book forum on Exporting Freedom earlier. Full information on the book is available here.

Schwoerer, "Gun Culture in Early Modern England"

New from the University of Virginia Press: Gun Culture in Early Modern England (May 2016), by Lois G. Schwoerer (George Washington University). A description from the Press:

Guns had an enormous impact on the social, economic, cultural, and political lives of civilian men, women, and children of all social strata in early modern England. In this study, Lois Schwoerer identifies and analyzes England’s domestic gun culture from 1500 to 1740, uncovering how guns became available, what effects they had on society, and how different sectors of the population contributed to gun culture.

The rise of guns made for recreational use followed the development of a robust gun industry intended by King Henry VIII to produce artillery and handguns for war. Located first in London, the gun industry brought the city new sounds, smells, street names, shops, sights, and communities of gun workers, many of whom were immigrants. Elite men used guns for hunting, target shooting, and protection. They collected beautifully decorated guns, gave them as gifts, and included them in portraits and coats-of-arms, regarding firearms as a mark of status, power, and sophistication. With statutes and proclamations, the government legally denied firearms to subjects with an annual income under £100—about 98 percent of the population—whose reactions ranged from grudging acceptance to willful disobedience. 

Schwoerer shows how this domestic gun culture influenced England’s Bill of Rights in 1689, a document often cited to support the claim that the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution conveys the right to have arms as an Anglo-American legacy. Schwoerer shows that the Bill of Rights did not grant a universal right to have arms, but rather a right restricted by religion, law, and economic standing, terms that reflected the nation's gun culture. Examining everything from gunmakers’ records to wills, and from period portraits to toy guns, Gun Culture in Early Modern England offers new data and fresh insights on the place of the gun in English society.

A few blurbs:

"Lois Schwoerer has taken an intrinsically interesting topic and provided a great deal of fascinating and deeply researched information stretching back over five centuries. Thanks to this deep historical context, her book gives valuable insight into the current American debate on gun culture and the origin of ‘the right to bear arms.’" -- Ian Gentles

"In her concise and colorful book, Lois G. Schwoerer tells the story about how England’s own fascination with guns led it to adopt a right-to-have-arms provision in its Declaration of Rights of 1689, almost exactly one century before Americans adopted the Second Amendment in their Bill of Rights. What were the English thinking? Modern readers on both sides of the Atlantic will be in for an enjoyable ride—and some real surprises." -- Carl Bogus

More information is available here.

New edited collection: "Marriage by Force? Contestation over Consent and Coercion in Africa"

New from Ohio University Press: Marriage by Force? Contestation over Consent and Coercion in Africa, edited by Annie Bunting (York University), Benjamin N. Lawrance (Rochester Institute of Technology), and Richard L. Roberts (Stanford University). A description from the Press:

With forced marriage, as with so many human rights issues, the sensationalized hides the mundane, and oversimplified popular discourses miss the range of experiences. In sub-Saharan Africa, the relationship between coercion and consent in marriage is a complex one that has changed over time and place, rendering impossible any single interpretation or explanation.

The legal experts, anthropologists, historians, and development workers contributing to Marriage by Force? focus on the role that marriage plays in the mobilization of labor, the accumulation of wealth, and domination versus dependency. They also address the crucial slippage between marriages and other forms of gendered violence, bondage, slavery, and servile status.

Only by examining variations in practices from a multitude of perspectives can we properly contextualize the problem and its consequences. And while early and forced marriages have been on the human rights agenda for decades, there is today an unprecedented level of international attention to the issue, thus making the coherent, multifaceted approach of Marriage by Force? even more necessary.

A few blurbs.

"This fascinating collection addresses the important problem of determining what forced marriage is through the perspective of historical studies of marriage from precolonial through postcolonial eras in Africa. The essays destabilize any idea that there is a simple dichotomy between forced and consensual marriage, and show that calling forms of coerced marriage customary or traditional ignores the extent to which tradition is constantly subject to change.” --  Sally Engle Merry

“This eloquent volume tackles age-old yet pressing problems of coercion, gender, and marriage in present-day Africa. The authors offer compelling case studies to demonstrate the deep-seated and complex values that underpin the subordination of women and girls and highlight the vulnerability of the female gender in the face of a growing movement—in Africa and abroad—to address the problem. This volume is a must-read for all those who teach, think, write, and formulate laws and public policy about gender and violence.” -- Makau Mutua

More information, including the TOC, is available here.

JEV-Fellowship for European Administrative History

[We have the following announcement of a research fellowship in the field of European Administrative History.  Note the deadline of September 30, 2016.  For further information please contact Priv. Doz. Dr. Peter Collin, collin@rg.mpg.de.]

At the end of 2012 Prof. Dr. Erk Volkmar Heyen, who served as Professor of Public Law and European Administrative History at the Ernst-Moritz-Arndt University of Greifswald until his retirement and as editor of the Jahrbuch für europäische Verwaltungsgeschichte/Yearbook of European Administrative History (JEV), which ran from 1989 to 2008, endowed a research fellowship in the field of European Administrative History ("The JEV-Fellowship for European Administrative History"). The fellowship falls within the framework of the German University Foundation (Bonn, Germany).

The scholarship is intended to benefit the next generation of scientific researchers, particularly doctoral and post-doctoral students, and exclusively to complete their research project in as brief a period as possible to a maximum of 12 months. The scholarship is based on the usual rates for doctoral fellowships of the German Research Foundation (DFG). Should a fellowship be awarded to a researcher outside Germany, local scholarship rates will be taken into consideration. Marital status will not be taken into account, nor will travel or overhead costs be reimbursed. 

Porwancher on "John Henry Wigmore and the Rules of Evidence"

New from the University of Missouri Press: John Henry Wigmore and the Rules of Evidence: The Hidden Origins of Modern Law (May 2016), by Andrew Porwancher (University of Oklahoma). A description from the Press:

At the dawn of the twentieth century, the United States was reeling from the effects of rapid urbanization and industrialization. Time-honored verities proved obsolete, and intellectuals in all fields sought ways to make sense of an increasingly unfamiliar reality. The legal system in particular began to buckle under the weight of its anachronism. In the midst of this crisis, John Henry Wigmore, dean of the Northwestern University School of Law, single-handedly modernized the jury trial with his 1904-5 Treatise on evidence, an encyclopedic work that dominated the conduct of trials. In so doing, he inspired generations of progressive jurists—among them Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Benjamin Cardozo, and Felix Frankfurter—to reshape American law to meet the demands of a new era. Yet Wigmore’s role as a prophet of modernity has slipped into obscurity. This book provides a radical reappraisal of his place in the birth of modern legal thought.

A few blurbs:

“[The book] will become the standard work on the subject, and more than that, will contribute to emerging clarity in the field of early twentieth-century legal ideas more broadly.”—Noah Feldman

“It evidences a close reading of Wigmore’s work and extensive work in the archives at Harvard and Northwestern, bringing to light a good deal of new material on the connections among important figures in ‘legal modernism.’”—Robert P. Burns

More information is available here.

Turk on US Marshals Service

David S. Turk, Historian of the US Marshals Service is coming out with Forging the Star: The Official Modern History of the United States Marshals Service (University of North Texas Press) this month. From the publisher:

What do diverse events such as the integration of the University of Mississippi, the federal trials of Teamsters President Jimmy Hoffa, the confrontation at Ruby Ridge, and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina have in common? The U.S. Marshals were instrumental in all of them. Whether pursuing dangerous felons in each of the 94 judicial districts or extraditing them from other countries; protecting federal judges, prosecutors, and witnesses from threats; transporting and maintaining prisoners and detainees; or administering the sale of assets obtained from criminal activity, the U.S. Marshals Service has adapted and overcome a mountain of barriers since their founding (on September 24, 1789) as the oldest federal law enforcement organization.

In Forging the Star, historian David S. Turk lifts the fog around the agency’s complex modern period. From the inside, he allows a look within the storied organization. The research and writing of this singular account took over a decade, drawn from fresh primary source material with interviews from active or retired management, deputy U.S. marshals who witnessed major events, and the administrative personnel who supported them. Forging the Star is a comprehensive official history that will answer many questions about this legendary agency.

And a blurb: 

"Turk advances our understanding of the U.S. Marshals Service into the modern era, heretofore a time generally overlooked, and he does it admirably.” –Bob Alexander

Full information is available here.

Craig on Hamburger's "Is Administrative Law Unlawful?"

Paul P. Craig, University of Oxford Faculty of Law, has posted The Legitimacy of US Administrative Law and the Foundations of English Administrative Law: Setting the Historical Record Straight, a detailed and lengthy critique of Philip Hamburger’s Is Administrative Law Unlawful?  (As a historical investigation of English practice growing out of a controversy over administrative law in the United States, Professor Craig's paper reminds me of the Control of Business project at Columbia University in the 1930s.)  Here is the abstract:

Administrative law is rightly regarded, together with constitutional law, as one of the twin pillars of public law. This is equally true for civil law regimes as it is for those grounded in the common law. The conceptual and normative foundations of administrative law should be examined with care, in the same way as for any other body of legal doctrine. Philip Hamburger recently posed a provocative challenge to administrative law in the USA, as attested to by the title to the book, which asks whether administrative law is unlawful. His thesis is grounded in English administrative law, as it developed in the seventeenth century and eighteenth centuries, when lawyers in the American colonies would have been familiar with it. Indeed this analysis occupies approximately half of the book. It is perfectly legitimate for Hamburger to pose searching questions concerning the legitimacy of administrative law. It is by the same token equally fitting to subject this analysis to close critical scrutiny, which is the purpose of this article. This is more especially so given that there is much that is imperfectly understood about English doctrinal history in this area, and the misconceptions in this respect bear analogy to those revealed in Jerry Mashaw’s seminal work on the foundations of US administrative law.

The ensuing analysis does not consider the fit between Hamburger’s argument and modern US administrative and constitutional law. There has been valuable literature on this by those better versed than I in such issues, and I agree with their arguments. What follows is directed towards the central parts of Hamburger’s thesis that are built on English administrative law. It will be argued that his thesis is misconceived, and does not represent the reality of this law in the seventeenth century or thereafter, with which American colonists might have been familiar. The argument presented below is also of more general relevance, since it will be shown that Hamburger’s thesis is predicated on certain conceptual distinctions that are untenable. The structure of the argument is as follows.

Lovelace on "William Worthy's Passport" and more in June JAH

The June issue of the Journal of American History is now out. One article that is sure to interest many of our readers is "William Worthy's Passport: Travel Restrictions and the Cold War Struggle for Civil and Human Rights," by H. Timothy Lovelace, Jr. (University of Indiana Maurer School of Law). Here's the abstract:

In April 1964 Malcolm X boldly challenged black activists to “expand the civil rights struggle to the level of human rights” and “take the case of the black man in this country before the nations in the U.N.” But nearly two years earlier, William Worthy, black America’s star foreign correspondent, had taken his case before both U.S. courts and the United Nations. In 1961 Worthy defied the U.S. travel ban to Cuba to report on racial progress on the island. The State Department had the names of more than two hundred citizens who had violated the travel ban, but federal officials singled out the radical journalist for prosecution, making him the first American convicted of returning to the United States without a valid passport. H. Timothy Lovelace Jr. explores how Worthy invoked the U.S. Constitution and international human rights law to fight his selective prosecution and uses Worthy v. United States to offer fresh understandings of black internationalism in the 1960s.

Full content is available only to subscribers, unfortunately.

Roundup Update

• Legal historian Rise Goluboff becomes the University of Virginia School of Law's first female dean.  UVA's press release is here. 

• In today's New York Times, an op-ed by former LHB Guest Blogger Mary Ziegler (Florida State University) draws on history to discuss "Where the Pro-Life Movement Goes Next."

• David Bernstein, George Mason Law, on G. Edward White's Law in American History, Volume 2, on The Volokh Conspiracy.

Sunday Book Roundup

Independence Day is probably big for legal history buffs.  But if you're not reading (or watching) themed content, you might enjoy these book reviews.

In the NY Times, Christopher Brown reviews Wendy Warren’s New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America (which “conveys the disorientation, the deprivation, the vulnerability, the occasional hunger and the profound isolation that defined the life of most African exiles in Puritan New England, where there was no plantation community.”) Legal historians may also be interested in Sam Moyn’s review of Spiral: Trapped in the Forever War, journalist Mark Danner’s take on the war on terror. As a historian, Moyn takes issue with Danner’s argument that the war is “exceptional” in its use of torture. Instead, Moyn argues, the war on terror “has been brought within law governing the conduct of hostilities to a remarkable extent,” which makes it all the more pernicious and “harder to rein in.” Moyn expands on the review in the Lawfare Blog.

In a dishearteningly well-timed piece, David Cole reviews three books about guns in America, including Pamela Haag’s history of the gun industry, in the NY Review of Books.

The Guardian recently published a short summary of Food Worth Fighting For, Josh Sutton’s history of food riots, an excerpt from Witness to the Revolution by Clara Bingham and a July Fourth reading list that includes Annette Gordon-Reed on Jefferson and the obligatory Hamilton mention.

The New Books Network features discussions with Marlene Trestman, author of Fair Labor Lawyer: The Remarkable Life of New Deal Attorney and Supreme Court Advocate Bessie Margolin; Michael Barnett, whose The Star and the Stripes explores the foreign policy priorities of American Jews; Gregory Domber, author of Empowering Revolution: America, Poland, and the End of the Cold War and Anthea Kraut, whose Choreographing Copyright: Race, Gender and Intellectual Property Rights in American Dance reveals how shifting conceptions of race and gender shaped the way we think of dance, property and ownership.

Weekend Roundup

• The Law and Society Association has launched a new Teaching Materials Repository, which is accessible to LSA members (via "Teaching Materials" on the LSA website after logging in). As more of us contribute syllabi, there should be more and more legal historical content. You can add your PDF syllabi here.

• The ESCLH blog notes the positing of a job listing for a Recrutement d'un vacataire en Histoire du Droit (TD, LD1, sem. 1 & 2), for September 2016-June 2017, at the Université deVersailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, France. 

• Congratulations to our own Guest Blogger Sarah Barringer Gordon, Penn Law, for receiving the Lester J. Cappon Prize, “which honors the best article published in the William and Mary Quarterly in the previous year,” for “The African Supplement: Religion, Race, and Corporate Law in Early National America.”  More.

• Some Late Thoughts on the American Civil War and Southern Identity, from Seth Barrett Tillman.

Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers. 

Hays on Andrew Jackson and Native-American Sovereignty

Joel Stanford Hays has posted Twisting the Law: Legal Inconsistencies in Andrew Jackson's Treatment of Native-American Sovereignty and State Sovereignty, which appeared in the Journal of Southern Legal History 21 (2013): 157-92:

Andrew Jackson (LC)

This article explores the legal history and development of federal Native-American law doctrine, focusing on the sovereignty of Native-American tribes as a basis of Native-American tribal power. Native-American sovereignty has been infringed upon by governmental policies, especially during the Andrew Jackson administration. Although Andrew Jackson was a supporter of state sovereignty, Jackson often ignored guaranteed protections of the federal government to the Native-American nations, intruding on the individual State’s prerogatives. The legal inconsistencies in Andrew Jackson’s treatment of Native-American sovereignty and State sovereignty is analyzed. The influence of Jacksonian administration policies on the subsequent development of Native-American law doctrine, governmental policies, and the judicial philosophy of individual Supreme Court Justices,  is traced through the twenty-first century.

Kwak on Desan's "Making Money"

Over at Baseline Scenario, James Kwak, an associate professor at the University of Connecticut School of Law, has posted a thoughtful review of Making Money: Coin, Currency and the Coming of Capitalism, by HLS’s Christine Desan.  “It’s a fascinating story,” Kwak writes, “full of both meticulous historical detail and compelling conceptual arguments about the relationship between forms of currency, political authority, and the creation of the modern state.”