This issue of Law and History Review features articles about nineteenth and early-twentieth century legal regimes in Cuba, Russia, China, Egypt, and Ireland. The authors are broadly interested in conflicts between norms and formal legal systems, especially how contests over ideas, customs, and property necessitated dramatic changes in legal doctrine and practice.
Our first article by Adriana Chira, “Affective Debts: Manumission by Grace and the Making of Gradual Emancipation Laws in Cuba, 1817–68,” is a comprehensive study of freedom litigants’ strategy for pursuing their freedom in nineteenth century Cuba. Chira's intervention is twofold. She argues that freedom litigants were most successful when they framed their manumission as debt repayment for affective labor instead of as a gift of grace. This strategy would have a profound effect, because as litigants revealed the transactional and market logic of domestic slavery, they created a sense that their affective labor made them deserving of emancipation. The emergence of emancipation as a merit-based right through freedom litigation thus set the stage for Cuban emancipation laws in the 1880s.
Sergei Antonov's “Russian Capitalism on Trial: The Case of the Jacks of Hearts,” is our second article. Antonov tells the story of early Russian capitalism in crisis as an alleged criminal organization of well-heeled merchants and landowners—the so-called “Jacks of Hearts Club”—stood accused of almost a decade's worth of fraud, forgery, and other criminal acts. Legend had it, for example, that the club's leader Pavel Speier had duped a gullible mark into buying the Moscow governor general's official residence. During the trial, the Moscow District Court became the venue of a conflict over the relationship between the state and the marketplace, as prosecutors developed a critique of elite property owners’ seemingly limitless thirst for wealth as a crime against the middle classes.
Our next article, “Law, Custom, and Social Norm: Civil Adjudications in Qing and Republican China” by Xiaoqun Xu, identifies that prior to the enactment of the Chinese Civil Code in 1929–30, courts had minimal guidance as to how to adjudicate civil disputes. How, then, asks Xu, did they do so? He studies a series of civil cases from Guangdong and Jiangsu provinces in 1912, Supreme Court cases between 1912 and 1929, and the eventual Civil Code of 1929–30, in order to argue that there was substantial continuity in civil cases between Qing and Republican China. Judges sought to balance the rapidly evolving letter of civil law with custom and social norm that had received great deference in the past.
We then move to nineteenth-century Egypt, where David Todd questions the relationship between European extraterritoriality and national sovereignty. In “Beneath Sovereignty: Extraterritoriality and Imperial Internationalism in Nineteenth Century Egypt,” Todd breaks with the view that European imperial extraterritoriality inspired nations to build their own legal regimes to protect themselves from further encroachments. For Todd, rather, European extraterritoriality enervated Egyptian sovereignty, as witnessed in the economic rulings of mixed or “international courts,” stacked with European appointees, which rebuffed Egypt's regulatory powers until 1949. Todd also emphasizes the role of French legal interventionism in nineteenth century Europe because French officials offered more robust justifications of extraterritoriality than did British officials.
Our final article by Lynsey Black, “‘On the other hand the accused is a woman…’ Women and the Death Penalty in Post-Independence Ireland,” is the first major study of the capital punishment of women in Ireland. Black studies government documents at the National Archives of Ireland to contribute to a burgeoning literature on the religious landscape of the Irish carceral state, especially in the activities of Magdalen laundries where women convicts were subjected to draconian measures. Women ended up at these sites after the merciful commutation of death sentences for major crimes. But what did “mercy” actually mean in the context of capital punishment? For Black, mercy was an outgrowth of paternalistic chivalry that excluded women from the normative center of society while also creating them as subjects of men's power.
Our Book Reviews section begins with a substantial review article by Anders Walker on six recent books on the law of Jim Crow in American history. Walker argues that the Jim Crow era, which has received sophisticated treatments by legal historians in the past, continues to give rise to powerful new approaches today.
We invite readers to also consider the American Society for Legal History's electronic discussion list, H-Law, and visit the Society's website at http://www.legalhistorian.org. Readers may also be interested in viewing the journal online, at http://journals.cambridge.org/LHR. Law and History Review is also active on Twitter at http://www.twitter.org/history_law or @history_law.
This is my first volume serving as Editor-in-Chief of Law and History Review, and I am delighted to announce that Professors Angela Fernandez of the University of Toronto Faculty of Law, Elizabeth Papp Kamali of Harvard Law School, and Jed Kroncke of FGV Direito SP, have agreed to serve as Associate Editors. Professor Fernandez will be responsible for book reviews on the Americas, Professor Kamali will be responsible for book reviews on Europe, and Professor Kroncke will be responsible for book reviews on Asia, Africa, and the Pacific. In welcoming our new team, I want to profusely thank Professor Elizabeth Dale of the University of Florida for her many years of outstanding service as Editor-in-Chief, and Professors Felice Batlan of Chicago-Kent College of Law and Will Hanley of Florida State University for their remarkable tenures as Associate Editors. Law and History Review is a better journal because of their incredible efforts.
