Forgotten Hills: Law, Environment, and Social Transformations on the Frontiers of Tibet and China

Wesley B. Chaney, Cambridge University Press (Forthcoming September 2026)

Forgotten Hills is a book about lost geographies. It is about how the subordination of mountainous Tibet to lowland China meant the erasure of the hills between, and how the legal, environmental, and social transformations of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries hardened boundaries between Tibetan, Chinese, and Muslim peoples, obscuring the histories and practices that had bound hill folk together for generations. Wesley B. Chaney tells the story of this transformation by exploring small communities on the ferociously complex “mid-slope”—the hills along the northeastern edges of the Tibetan Plateau. Drawing from legal cases, genealogies, and Tibetan-language histories, Forgotten Hills illustrates how disputes over traditional landholding regimes erupted into violent conflict over resources and ethnic and religious identity. The ethno-politics that define modern China, this book reveals, arose from the legal disputes and everyday politics of the now forgotten hills. (Purchase here.)

Legal Theory in the Colonies: Hindu and Jewish Scholars under British Rule

Assaf Likhovski, Cambridge University Press (Forthcoming August 2026)

In colonial India and Mandatory Palestine, early-twentieth-century legal scholars made important contributions to the study of the nature of law, particularly by analyzing Hindu and Jewish law – their ancient religious systems. This book reconstructs the lives and ideas of these scholars, revealing a forgotten global wave of jurisprudential innovation that appeared across many territories in the non-Western world. The book challenges the view that non-Western legal scholars working in the colonies were passive recipients of Western ideas. It argues that Indian and Jewish thinkers used Western historical and sociological approaches to law to reimagine Hindu and Jewish law, and to assert their relevance to modern legal and constitutional debates. Though historical in scope, the story this book tells is also relevant to contemporary tensions between Western liberal law and non-Western religious legal traditions. This title is available as open access on Cambridge Core. (Purchase here.)