‘A fascinating, comprehensive study that forces us to think again about what law is, and why it matters … For those who want to understand why human society has emerged as it has, this is essential reading’ Rana Mitter, author of China’s Good War
The laws now enforced throughout the world are almost all modelled on systems developed in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. During two hundred years of colonial rule, Europeans exported their laws everywhere they could. But they weren’t filling a void: in many places, they displaced traditions that were already ancient when Vasco Da Gama first arrived in India.
Where, then, did it all begin? And what has law been and done over the course of human history? In The Rule of Laws, pioneering anthropologist Fernanda Pirie traces the development of the world’s great legal systems – Chinese, Indian, Roman, and Islamic – and the innumerable smaller traditions they inspired.
About the author
Fernanda Pirie is Professor of the Anthropology of Law at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies at the University of Oxford, where she spent the past 10 years working with colleagues in history and anthropology looking at legal systems from throughout human history, comparing and contrasting, and charting their influence on the modern world. Prior to academia she was a practising barrister.
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