What role did law play in articulating sovereignty and citizenship in postcolonial Africa? Using legal records from the secessionist Republic of Biafra, this article analyzes the relationship between law and national identity in an extreme context—that of the Nigerian Civil War (1967–1970). Ideas about order, discipline, and legal process were at the heart of Biafra's sense of itself as a nation, and they served as the rhetorical justification for its secession from Nigeria. But they were not only rhetoric. In the turmoil of the ensuing civil war, Biafra's courts became the center of its national culture, and law became its most important administrative implement. In court, Biafrans argued over what behaviors were permissible in wartime, and judges used law to draw the boundaries of the new country's national identity. That law played this role in Biafra shows something broader about African politics: law, bureaucracy, and paperwork meant more to state-making than declensionist views of postcolonial Africa usually allow. Biafra failed as a political project, but it has important implications for the study of law in postcolonial Africa, and for the nation-state form in general.

What were the consequences of creating jurisdictions against the transatlantic slave trade in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world? Answering this question requires a comparative focus on the courts of mixed commission that adjudicated naval captures of slave ships, located at Sierra Leone (the foremost site of British abolition) and Brazil (the primary mid-century target). Court jurisdiction conflicted with sovereign jurisdiction regarding the presence of recaptives (“liberated Africans”), the risk of re-enslavement, and unlawful naval captures. To rescue the re-enslaved and compensate the loss of property, regulating anti-slave-trade jurisdiction involved coercive strategies alternating with negotiated value exchanges. Abolition as a legal field emerged from interactions between liberated Africans, British diplomatic and naval agents, and local political elites in Brazil and on the Upper Guinea Coast.

Child soldiers are often viewed as a contemporary, “new war” phenomenon, but international concern about their use first emerged in response to anti-colonial liberation struggles. Youth were important actors in anti-colonial insurgencies, but their involvement has been neglected in existing historiographies of decolonization and counterinsurgency due to the absence and marginalization of youth voices in colonial archives. This article analyses the causes of youth insurgency and colonial counterinsurgency responses to their involvement in conflict between ca. 1945 and 1960, particularly comparing Kenya and Cyprus, but also drawing on evidence from Malaya, Indochina/Vietnam, and Algeria. It employs a generational lens to explore the experiences of “youth insurgents” primarily between the ages of twelve and twenty. Youth insurgents were most common where the legitimate grievances of youth were mobilized by anti-colonial groups who could recruit children through colonial organizations as well as family and social networks. While some teenagers fought due to coercion or necessity, others were politically motivated and willing to risk their lives for independence. Youth soldiers served in multiple capacities in insurgencies, from protestors to couriers to armed fighters, in roles that were shaped by multiple logics: the need for troop fortification and sustained manpower; the tactical exploitation of youth liminality, and the symbolic mobilization of childhood and discourses of childhood innocence. Counterinsurgency responses to youthful insurgents commonly combined violence and development, highlighting tensions within late colonial governance: juveniles were beaten, detained, and flogged, but also constructed as “delinquents” rather than “terrorists” to facilitate their subsequent “rehabilitation.”

Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, Latin America became something of a dumping ground for U.S. priests suspected of sexual abuse, with north-to-south clerical transfers sending predatory priests to countries where pedophilia did not exist in any kind of ontological sense. This article, in response, engages the case of Father David Roney of the Archdiocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis, Minnesota. After a career of accusations and payouts, with Roney entering and exiting Church-mandated therapy programs, Bishop Raymond Lucker retired this notoriously predatory priest to rural Guatemala in 1994. By placing Roney beyond the reach of psychiatrists, psychologists, and spiritual directors, the Roman Catholic Church leveraged a psychological and juridical difference between two geographical settings in order to render the pedophilia of this priest effectively non-existent, thereby insulating itself from further reputational damage and additional litigation. Given that the Roman Catholic Church has long been an empirical point of reference for studies of subject formation—from pastoralism and mysticism to ritual and the confession—this article adds that the Church also provides ample evidence of an opposite process: of unmaking people.

In 1922, one of the most famous Muslim scholars of modern times, the Syrian-Egyptian reformer Rashīd Riḍā, published in his journal a detailed fatwa in defense of alcohol. He did so in reaction to an obscure Indian jurist's fatwa that had warned Muslims not to use alcoholic products. On the surface, the authors of the fatwas appeared to be principally concerned with the right way to interpret sacred laws of purity and pollution. However, this article reveals that their disagreement had much to do with differing approaches to the politics of independence. Their divergence is intriguing because the cities where they lived, Cairo and Bombay, had just experienced the convulsions of anti-British consumer boycotts. And it emerged at a time when anti-imperial Muslim activists from the Middle East and South Asia were rallying together for a pan-Islamic cause—to prevent the final collapse of the caliphate. These movements swayed both Riḍā and his rival, who may well be described as Muslim nationalists. Yet they embraced radically different strategies for independence. One aimed for national purity, the other for national power. This discrepancy led to the battle of fatwas—a forgotten battle that is worth remembering because it suggests some of the difficulties that Muslim jurists of Arab or Indian ancestry faced during the interwar period when they tried to turn Islamic law into an effective nationalist discourse.

This article addresses how long tenant farmers in the Russian Baltic Provinces of Estland and Livland managed to occupy the farms and whether they transferred them within the family in the early phase of agricultural transformation (1841–1889). It contributes to the long-standing debate over the relative power of manorial lords and tenants in the (East Elbian) manorial system. Looking at individual-level data on the changes in tenantship on more than 1,000 farmsteads across 5 parishes, the article demonstrates the relative instability of tenant holdings and lack of independence in land transfers on noble manors.

Records of proof-of-age hearings from 1246 to 1430 which mention land transfer are analysed by techniques aimed at overcoming the legal conventionality of the texts and the widespread plagiarism of the records of previous hearings. References are examined decade by decade, initially in terms of the numbers of testimonies mentioning land and, most importantly, in terms of their changing syntax, vocabulary and choice of detail. This approach gives clues to the state of the land market itself and to the mentalities of those involved. Particular attention is paid to the effects on the market of the economic and demographic shocks of the fourteenth century.

This article focuses on the role played by local mobility in processes of confession and community building, taking the Catholic population in seventeenth-century Palestine as a case study. Works on the Reformation in Europe have acknowledged a connection between the strengthening of confessional identities and geographical mobility. Through the analysis of the parish records of Bethlehem, the article reveals some characteristics of seventeenth-century Catholic mobility in Palestine and shows how this mobility was bound up with the consolidation of a tiny Catholic minority and the establishment of a sacramental network. From a larger perspective, this research suggests that mobility plays an important role in the development and consolidation of small communities in a context of competing religion. From a methodological point of view, it also shows the importance of microanalysis in understanding the geographical mobility associated with religious practices and allegiances.

The characterisation of medieval childbirth as profoundly dangerous is both long-standing and poorly supported by quantitative data. This article, based on a database tracking the reproductive lives of 102 late medieval aristocratic Englishwomen, allows not only for an evaluation of this trope but also an analysis of risk factors, including maternal youth and short birth intervals. Supplemented with evidence from medieval medical tracts and osteoarchaeological data related to pubertal development and nutrition, this study demonstrates that reproduction was hardly the main driver of mortality among elite women.

The privatisation of communal assets tends to be presented as an irreversible linear movement that was driven from above. Based on a case study (Navarre, nineteenth century), this article seeks to give greater prominence to local players and their response to changing circumstances. The process thus appears less linear and compact by revealing certain anomalies, such as the reversibility of certain sales or the alienation of partial ownership rights that were compatible with the preservation of rights of use in favour of local councils and households, as an example of institutional bricolage. Against a backdrop of war and municipal bankruptcy, the privatisation of collective lands between 1808 and 1860 followed various paths, each one benefitting different social classes. Borrowers, outside investors and wealthy individuals accumulated large estates, but there was also a chance for peasants and local people to become property owners. The recovery of part of these lands on the back of social conflicts from 1884 onwards confirms that privatisation was not a fait accompli.