In this episode, Siobhan talks to Nurfadzilah Yahaya about her book Fluid Jurisdictions: Colonial Law and Arabs in Southeast Asia (Cornell University Press, 2020). She is an Assistant Professor of History at the National University of Singapore, where she specializes in the history of the Indian Ocean, Southeast Asia, Islamic Law and Mobility. His second book project will deal with the history of land reclamation in the British Empire. In an extraordinarily creative and imaginative thesis entitled “Captured Consent: Bound Service and Freedom of Contract in Early Modern England and English America”, Sonia Tycko examines the repeated occurrence of consent in the context of the importance of compulsory service in the early modern period. The appearance of the language of consent in contracts by people who did not have the right to refuse was not a veneer that obscured coercion or understanding of work as a community resource. Instead, this “forced consent” expressed practices and understandings associated with the origins of “freedom of contract.” As she argues in an innovative way, “consent was a tool for masters to discipline and appropriate the work of the less powerful.” Their reasoning carefully explains how, as early as the late sixteenth century, approval became a means of distinguishing forced labor from slavery with “a touch of politeness,” while being intended to reproduce inequalities rather than create equality. By exposing this dynamic – sometimes considered part of nineteenth- or twentieth-century labor history – to the early modern period, Tycko forces us to rethink the foundations of consent and contract and sends a signal to the historiography of contract, labor, and freedom. Tycko also offers nuanced readings of an impressive array of primary sources, revealing the social realities before which a vocabulary about contracts has emerged in some labor relationships, from debt bondage to military influence to kidnapping. It sifts through documents that might fly over others and brings to the surface the very way words betray the underlying power dynamic. The important transatlantic lens convincingly establishes its reasoning within the framework of the broader seventeenth-century English hypotheses in Britain and the British colonies. This thesis rewards the reader on every page – and becomes even more interesting when re-read.
Tycko`s thesis serves as a model for the well-developed and carefully executed thesis in the history of law. Milteer`s groundbreaking study goes beyond portraying the American South as a region controlled by a strict racial hierarchy. He argues that although Northern Carolinians are often divided into races steeped in legal and social rights — whites posing above people of color — these efforts regularly clashed with their simultaneous recognition of class, gender, kinship, and occupational differences. Whites often determined the position of free non-whites by calling them valuable or consumable members of society. In early North Carolina, free people of color with a certain status had access to institutions that were not available even to some whites. Before 1835, for example, some free men of color had the right to vote, while the law disenfranchised all women, including whites and non-whites. This episode is part of a series of legal history books by UNC Press. Support for the production of this series was provided by the Versatile Humanists at Duke program. In this third expanded edition, Zelden offers a powerful history of suffrage and elections in America since 2000. Bush vs. Gore exposes the growing crisis by detailing how the unqualified and poorly learned “lessons of the year 2000” have affected U.S.
election law by increasing voter suppression through laws and administrative decisions, and clearly warns of how uncontrolled partisanship threatens Bush v. Gore for undermining American democracy in general and the 2020 election in particular. In eighteenth-century New Orleans, the legal testimony of about 150 enslaved women and men — like the testimony of free settlers — was meticulously recorded and preserved. Questioned in criminal trials as defendants, victims and witnesses of attacks, murders, robberies and escapes, they responded with stories about themselves, stories that refuted the premise on which slavery was based. Jilene Chua is a PhD student in history at John Hopkins University and is writing her dissertation on American imperial rule in the Philippines and how law shaped this colonial relationship. The working title is Chinese Encounters in the Philippines under American Legal Colonialism. The thesis shows how particularly strained relations between the Chinese community and the indigenous Filipino population broke up and calmed down at times, and how the U.S. state and law fueled such tensions through property rights, citizenship, and certain racialized and gendered concepts of a legal nature. Specifically, he is investigating a long series of court cases brought by Chinese litigants in the Philippines, ranging from fellow women vying for the property of their late Chinese husbands to business cases in which Chinese merchants have questioned the legitimacy of laws prohibiting record keeping in Mandarin.
While legal historians have done an excellent job on the United States. In territories like Puerto Rico, there has been little research on how the law in the Philippines worked under American colonialism. In this podcast, Siobhan talks to Gratz College President Paul Finkelman about his book Supreme Injustice: Slavery in the Nation`s Highest Court. Finkelman is a specialist in the history of slavery and law. He is also the author of more than 200 scientific articles and the author or editor of more than fifty books on a wide range of topics, including American Jewish history, American legal history, constitutional law, and baseball-related legal issues. AsLH is pleased to announce the winners of our 2020 awards, honors and scholarships! In this episode, Siobhan talks to Samuel Fury Childs Daly about his J. Willard Prize-winning book A History of the Republic of Biafra: Law, Crime, and the Nigerian Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2020).
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