In the early nineteenth century de Tocqueville contemplated the differences between France on the one hand and England and North America on the other. He came to the conclusion that he was witnessing the emergence of an unprecedented phenomenon, a new and ‘modern’ world compounded of democracy and individualism. For an inhabitant of France, the shock of the contrast was enormous. A similar shock had jolted those eighteenth-century Scotsmen whose observations of the contrasts between England the Highland Scotland had led them into speculations which laid the foundations for economics, sociology and anthropology as we know them today. Yet the contrasts would have been magnified a hundredfold if de Tocqueville, Millar, Kames, Adam Smith and others had come not from adjacent regions, but from the great civilizations that flourished elsewhere in the world. If they had come from India, or China, for example, as yet little affected by European culture, they would have been even more struck by the extraordinary civilization which was flourishing in England and North America. Concentrating for the moment on England, what were the most outstanding features of this brave new world?

Our hypothetical oriental visitor, male or female, would have found a peculiar legal system, based on unwritten codes and precedents, known as the Common Law, combined with a separate and equally strange system known as Equity. This legal system had many unique features; for instance the use of juries, the absence of judicial torture, the concept of equality before the law. The law enshrined an obsession with property, which was conceived of as virtually private, rather than communal. These strange procedures and concepts of the law were linked to political and constitutional peculiarities. The most important of these was the idea of the sovereignty of the people and the supremacy of law. The Crown was under the law and answerable to the people in parliament; this was not an absolutist state but a limited monarchy.