The conclusion brings together the themes that have emerged throughout the book, provides comparative perspectives, teases out some of the wider implications for the study of gender and suggests directions for future research. It also comes back to the multitude of animals that have appeared sporadically throughout the different chapters, discussing the role they played in gender construction and the potential of human/animal connections to decentre the man in the process of creating male subjectivities.

The introduction outlines the arrangement of the book, explains the comparative method and the selection of the case studies, and comments on the primary sources.

Chapter 1 provides essential orientation for the rest of the volume’s contents. It begins by introducing some key issues including recent attempts to define ‘law’ and the challenges of undertaking a comparative history of ancient law (past and present). The next section moves on to introducing the different types of source material covered in the volume, introducing seven ‘rough categories’ of evidence: normative texts; commentaries; documentary records; ‘reports’ or ‘records’ of ‘cases’; portrayals of legal processes, and model forensic speeches; ritual forms; and ‘law’ in other forms of text. The final part of the chapter gives an overview of the major features and specific historical contexts for the principal legal traditions, intended as both introduction and information to be referred back to when consulting the volume as a whole.

This chapter begins with a discussion of the terminology and conceptual frameworks that are useful for contextualizing pre-modern Chinese sources about sex and sexuality. It then surveys several well-studied institutions and practices, including sex manuals, concubinage, female chastity, illicit sex, and literary representations of homoeroticism. The second half of the chapter reflects on three phenomena in works on the history of sexuality in pre-modern China, namely retrospective sexology, the censorship hypothesis, and the assumption of sex as a given. The author argues that while historians now no longer characterize sex culture in ancient China as either ‘liberated’ or ‘repressed’, as old sexologists did, we still tend to assume that the history of sexuality should primarily be about sexual practice and behaviour, despite the acknowledged lack of sources. The lack of sources, in turn, is often assumed to be the result of political and ideological censorship. More attention is needed to questioning scholars’ definition of the very subject matter, sex. The chapter concludes with a short review of scholarly approaches to comparing China with other cultures and a proposal of the ways in which a comparative history of sexuality can be productive.

Medieval societies did not exclusively and inflexibly conceive kingship as the remit of a mature man, even if adult male rulers were more typical. This introduction shows the urgency and timeliness of looking beyond the ‘unspoken hegemony’ of adulthood to understand the intersections between childhood and kingship. Focusing first on the interconnectedness of representation and reality, the chapter highlights the necessity of uniting an emphasis on children’s lived experiences as political actors with an examination of cultural representations of ideas about childhood and rulership. The introduction then turns to consider three essential components which shape this study’s methodology: a comparative approach, a diachronic analysis and a holistic approach to the sources. This section argues for the importance of contextualising child kingship within a wider comparative framework which accounts for political, social, cultural and legal change. It also sketches the benefits of adopting a broad approach to the source material which incorporates chronicle, documentary, didactic, epistolary, legal and literary sources.

This chapter looks at the spread of global history globally and the abandonment of historiographical nationalism. It examines the long practice of comparative, transnational and global history writing since the Enlightenments. It also looks at the construction of peculiarities and exceptionalisms through comparison as well as their critique. It distinguishes between comparative and global history and links the rise of both to the renewed crisis of historicism since the 1980s. It also discusses the controvery between comparative historians and historians of cultural transfer, arguing that both approaches need to be united. The chapter highlights the idea of circulations and examines the explosion of global history around particular themes. It also underlines its usefulness in overcoming Western-centric models of development and questioning universalisms. Transnational, comparative and global histories have all contributed to decentring collective identity constructions and making historians more aware of the ways in which historical writing has been connected to the construction of such collective identities. This is shown in relation to spatial boundaries, be they national or supra-national, but also in relation to class, racial and gender identities. Postcolonial perspectives on global history have been particularly adept at questioning the Western-centrism of historical writing and understanding diverse regimes of colonialism. It has also made transnational global history more aware of its own temptation to further global identities.

What are we talking about when we talk about high medieval Latin Europe? That is the key question underpinning the first chapter. It draws attention to shared political structures and the common cultural framework within which men and women of the central Middle Ages engaged with the practice and the ideal of kingship. In sketches both the resources and means of governance at the disposal of rulers and ruled, and the intellectual toolkit available to them in thinking about the role and purpose of the king’s office. The chapter furthermore highlights what sets the period apart from the Carolingian era and the later Middle Ages, and explores how people viewed their part of the world as a coherent whole, related to but distinctive from the Islamic world and Byzantium.

This volume is a selection of essays taken from the excellent range of papers presented at the British Legal History Conference hosted by the Institute for Legal and Constitutional Research at the University of St Andrews, 10–13 July 2019. The theme of the conference gives this book its title: ‘comparative legal history’. The topic came easily to the organisers because of their association with the St Andrews-based European Research Council Advanced grant project ‘Civil law, common law, customary law: consonance, divergence and transformation in Western Europe from the late eleventh to the thirteenth centuries’. But the chosen topic was also connected to the fact that this was, we think, the first British Legal History Conference held at a university without a Law faculty. Bearing in mind the question of how far institutional setting determines approach, our hope was that an element of fruitful comparison would stimulate people to think further about the range of approaches to legal history. With its explicit agenda of breaking down barriers, comparative legal history provided a particularly suitable focus for this investigation. After situating the subject matter of comparative legal history, and then discussing the levels of comparison that may be most fertile, this introduction moves on to considering the practical tasks of researching and writing such history, using the essays included in the volume to suggest ways ahead. The introduction groups the essays under certain headings: ‘Exploring legal transplants’; ‘Investigating broader geographical areas’; ‘Case law, precedent and relationships between legal systems’; and ‘Exploring past comparativists and the challenges of writing comparative legal history’. Yet the essays could be kaleidoscopically rearranged under many headings. We hope that the book, like a successful conference, includes many stimulating conversations.

Comparing cultural developments in Ireland with European romanticism is problematic on a number of scores. The European periodisation of romanticism is broader than the English-derived start- and end-dates applied to Ireland; European surveys, in aggregating many exemplars from many different countries, create an unjustified impression of quantitative preponderance, against which background any small individual country would appear comparatively scant; and a proper European comparison should juxtapose Ireland with similar countries (imperial peripheries like Bohemia, Croatia, or Finland), rather than with imperial-metropolitan heartlands such as neighbouring France or England. This chapter attempts to correct these imbalances. Most importantly, it is argued that romanticism manifested itself, not only in the field of poetic production (to which its meaning is reduced nowadays), but also in the fields of cultural reflection and knowledge production; and it is in these fields that Irish developments are most closely analogous to European ones.

This chapter introduces and motivates the main theme of the book and the key questions related to the development of fiscal capacity in colonial Asia and Africa. We situate the colonial fiscal state in the context of the changing world order in the long century between 1850 and 1960. We discuss the historiography and existing theoretical perspectives on fiscal development, arguing that these remain biased towards the European, or Eurasian experience at best. We also summarize the key insights of all the chapters in light of the general patterns that emerge from the comparative perspective adopted in this book. Finally, we formulate a brief future research agenda which identifies the next steps to be taken to improve our understanding of the various ways in which fiscal states have developed across the globe since the mid-nineteenth century.