The Judgment of the Provinces: The Roman Empire and the Origins of Law and Society

Ari Z. Bryen, Cambridge University Press (March 2026)

Roman law is justly famous, but what was its relationship to governing an empire? In this book, Ari Z. Bryen argues that law, as the learned practice that we know today, emerged from the challenge of governing a diverse and fractious set of imperial subjects. Through analysis of these subjects’ political and legal ideologies, Bryen reveals how law became the central topic of political contest in the Roman Empire. Law offered a means of testing legitimacy and evaluating government, as well as a language for asking fundamental political questions. But these political claims did not go unchallenged. Elites resisted them, and jurists, in collaboration with emperors, reimagined law as a system that excluded the voices of the governed. The result was to separate, for the first time, ‘law’ from ‘society’ more broadly, and to define law as a primarily literate and learned practice, rather than the stuff of everyday life. (Purchase here.)

Reluctant Abolitionists: Britain and the End of the Colonial Death Penalty

James M. Campbell, Cambridge University Press (February 2026)

Britain abolished the death penalty for murder in 1965, but many of Britain’s last colonies retained capital murder laws until the 1990s. In this book, James M. Campbell presents the first history of the death sentences imposed under British colonial rule in the late twentieth century; the decision-making processes that determined if condemned prisoners lived or died; and the diverse paths to death penalty abolition across the empire. Based on a rich archive of recently released government records, as well as legislative debates, court papers, newspapers and autobiographies, Reluctant Abolitionists examines connections between the death penalty, British politics, decolonisation and the rise of international abolitionist movements. Through analysis of murder trials, clemency appeals, executions and legal reforms across more than 30 British colonies, it reveals the limits of British opposition to the death penalty and the enduring connections between capital punishment and empire. (Purchase here.)

Captured Consent: Contract Labor in English Charity, Colonization, and War, 1600–1700

Sonia Tycko, Cambridge University Press (February 2026)

Consent has been celebrated as a guarantor of liberty and self-determination; however, its history suggests a different meaning. In this book, Sonia Tycko reconstructs the coercive role of contracts in early modern English labor. The long-term, long-distance, and high-risk nature of pauper apprenticeships, transatlantic indentured servitude, military conscription, and prisoner of war labor drove some English people to develop consent into a tool of labor coercion. Coercion could constitute valid consent for people whose social position, age, and gender fit the profile of natural laborers. Many subordinates experienced consenting – or the presumption of their consent – as a form of acceptance of, or even submission to, their position. This book reveals that early modern labor was one of the fields in which ideas of freedom of contract, voluntariness, and enticement developed. (Purchase here.)

Court, Credit, and Capital: Amsterdam’s Insolvency Legislation in the Dutch Golden Age

Maurits den Hollander, Cambridge University Press (November 2025)

Seventeenth-century Amsterdam was a city of innovations. Explosive economic growth, the expansion of overseas trade, and a high level of religious tolerance sparked great institutional, socioeconomic and legal changes, a period generally known as ‘the Dutch Golden Age.’ In this book, Maurits den Hollander discusses how insolvency legislation contributed to the rise of a modern commercial order in seventeenth-century Amsterdam. He analyzes the procedure and principles behind Amsterdam’s specialized insolvency court (the Desolate Boedelskamer, 1643) from a theoretical perspective as well as through the eyes of citizens whose businesses failed. The Amsterdam authorities created a regulatory environment which solved insolvency more leniently, and thus economically more efficiently, than in previous times or places. Moving beyond the traditional view of insolvency as a moral failure and the debtor as a criminal, the Amsterdam court recognized that business failure was often beyond the insolvent’s personal control, and helped restore trust and credit among creditors and debtors. (Purchase here.)

Transborder Fugitives, Extradition, and Political Crimes in Modern China

Jenny Huangfu Day, Cambridge University Press (November 2025)

Uncovering a series of landmark but often overlooked extradition cases between China and foreign powers from the 1860s to the 1920s, this study challenges the prevailing conception that political crimes in China were solely a domestic phenomenon. Extradition and extraterritoriality played an important role in shaping laws and regulations related to political crimes in modern China. China’s inability to secure reciprocal extradition treaties was historically rooted in the legacy of extraterritoriality and semi-colonialism. Jenny Huangfu Day illustrates how the fugitive rendition clauses in the Opium War treaties evolved into informal extradition procedures and describes how the practice of fugitive rendition changed from the late Qing to Republican China. Readers will gain an understanding of the interaction between international law, diplomacy, and municipal laws in the jurisdiction of political crimes in modern China, allowing Chinese legal history to be brought into conversation with transnational legal scholarship. (Purchase here.)

Extradition & Empire: Sovereignty and Subjecthood in Hong Kong

Ivan Lee, Cambridge University Press (September 2025)

In the first book-length study of the imperial history of extradition in Hong Kong, Ivan Lee shows how British judges, lawyers, and officials navigated the nature of extradition, debated its legalities, and distinguished it over time from other modalities of criminal jurisdiction – including deportation, rendition, and trial and punishment under territorial and extraterritorial laws. These complex debates were rooted in the contested legal status of Chinese subjects under the Opium War treaties of 1842–43. They also intersected wider shifts and tensions in British ideas of territorial sovereignty, criminal justice and procedure, and the legal rights and liabilities of British subjects and alien persons in British territory. By the 1870s, a new area of imperial law emerged as Britain incorporated a frontier colony into an increasingly territorial and legally homogenous empire. This important perspective revises our understanding of the legal origins of colonial Hong Kong and British imperialism in China. (Purchase here.)

The Nation at Sea: The Federal Courts and American Sovereignty, 1789–1825

Kevin Arlyck, Cambridge University Press (August 2025)

The Nation at Sea tells a new story about the federal judiciary, and about the early United States itself. Most accounts of the nation’s transformation from infant republic to world power ignore the courts. Their importance, if any, was limited to domestic politics. But the truth is that, in the critical decades following the Constitution’s ratification, federal judges decided thousands of maritime cases that profoundly shaped the United States’ relations with foreign nations. Judges ruled on the legality of naval captures made by European powers, regulated the conduct of American merchants, and tried pirates and slave traders who sought profit amid the turmoil of transatlantic war. Kevin Arlyck’s vivid reconstruction of this forgotten history reveals how, over time, the federal courts helped realize an increasingly bold conception of American sovereignty, one that vindicated the Declaration of Independence’s claim to the United States’ place “among the powers of the earth.” (Click to Purchase)

Court, Credit, and Capital: Amsterdam’s Insolvency Legislation in the Dutch Golden Age

Maurits den Hollander, Cambridge University Press (August 2025)

The God and the Bureaucrat: Roman Law, Imperial Sovereignty, and Other Stories

Zachary Herz (Cambridge University Press, July 2025)

Why is Roman law so boring? In this book, Zachary Herz argues that the bureaucratic, positivistic world of Roman law is not a distraction from the violent autocracy of the Roman empire, but an imagined escape. Lawyers, bureaucrats, and even emperors used legal writing to think about worlds that were safer or fairer than the one in which they lived. This archive of political imagination slowly became a law-code, and now guides readers through a legal system about which its authors could only dream. From Augustus to Justinian, this book shows how law symbolized order in chaotic times, and how that symbol eventually took on a life of its own. From the enlightened judgements of Hadrian to the great jurists and child rulers of Severan Rome, Herz reveals what Romans were really talking about when they talked about law. (Click to purchase)

From Masters of Slaves to Lords of Lands: The Transformation of Ownership in the Western World

James Q. Whitman, Cambridge University Press (November 2024-online, print forthcoming)

Today we think of land as the paradigmatic example of property, while in the past, the paradigmatic example was often a slave. In this seminal work, James Q. Whitman asserts that there is no natural form of ownership. Whitman dives deep into the long Western history of this transformation in the legal imagination – the transformation from the ownership of humans and other living creatures to the ownership of land. This change extended over many centuries, coming to fruition only on the threshold of the modern era. It brought with it profound changes, not only in the way we understand ownership but also in the way we understand the state. Its most dramatic consequence arrived in the nineteenth century, with the final disappearance of the lawful private ownership of humans, which had been taken for granted for thousands of years. (Click to Purchase)

Trials of Sovereignty: Mercy, Violence, and the Making of Criminal Law in British India, 1857–1922

Alastair McClure, Cambridge University Press (November 2024)

Trials of Sovereignty offers the first legal history of mercy and discretion in nineteenth and twentieth-century India. Through a study of large-scale amnesties, the prerogative powers of pardon, executive commutation, and judicial sentencing practices, Alastair McClure argues that discretion represented a vital facet of colonial rule. In a bloody penal order, officials and judges consistently offered reduced sentences and pardons for select subjects, encouraging others to approach state institutions and confer the colonial state with greater legitimacy. Mercy was always a contested expression of sovereign power that risked exposing colonial weakness. This vulnerability was gradually recognized by colonial subjects who deployed a range of legal and political strategies to interrogate state power and question the lofty promises of British colonial justice. By the early twentieth century, the decision to break the law and reject imperial overtures of mercy had developed into a crucial expression of anticolonial politics. (Click to Purchase)

Family Matters: Queer Households and the Half-Century Struggle for Legal Recognition

Marie-Amelie George, Cambridge University Press (May 2024)

In 1960, consensual sodomy was a crime in every state in America. Fifty-five years later, the Supreme Court ruled that same-sex couples had the fundamental right to marry. In the span of two generations, American law underwent a dramatic transformation. Though the fight for marriage equality has received a considerable amount of attention from scholars and the media, it was only a small part of the more than half-century struggle for queer family rights. Family Matters uncovers these decades of advocacy, which reshaped the place of same-sex sexuality in American law and society – and ultimately made marriage equality possible. This book, however, is more than a history of queer rights. Marie-Amélie George reveals that national legal change resulted from shifts at the state and local levels, where the central figures were everyday people without legal training. Consequently, she offers a new way of understanding how minority groups were able to secure meaningful legal change. (Click to Purchase)