Western Legal Imperialism: Thinking About the Deep Historical Roots
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James Q Whitman
We live in an age of massive efforts to transplant Western institutions. Some of those efforts have involved the so-called "Washington Consensus"; some have involved International Human Rights; but all of them have brought the West to the rest of the world, and all of them reflect a kind of missionary drive. What are the historical sources of this legal missionizing? This Article argues that those sources long predate the twentieth century, and indeed long predate the colonial adventures that began in the sixteenth century. Western law was already culturally predisposed to spread well before Iberian ships reached the Americas. In particular, Western law began, in antiquity, as city-state law, and only gradually penetrated the countryside. This colonization of the countryside by the cities took place partly under the influence of Christianity. It also reflected a centrally important event in the development of Western law: the great northward shift of the center of gravity of Western culture from the Mediterranean to trans-alpine Europe, which we can roughly date to 700-1000 C.E. The long, slow internal colonization of the countryside in the West set much of the pattern for the external colonization of the non-Western world that eventually commenced in the sixteenth century.
©2011 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Article
- Introduction
- The Concept of Law: A Western Transplant?
- Transplantation and Mutation in Anglo-American Trust Law
- Transplants and Timing: Passages in the Creation of an Anglo-American Law of Slavery
- Deciding Against Conciliation: The Nineteenth-Century Rejection of a European Transplant and the Rise of a Distinctively American Ideal of Adversarial Adjudication
- The Invention of Legal Primitivism
- Race, Marriage, and Sovereignty in the New World Order
- Constitutional Transplants
- Some Reflections on the Transplantation of British Company Law in Post-Ottoman Palestine
- Jefferson Goes East: The American Origins of the Israeli Declaration of Independence
- Argonauts of the Eastern Mediterranean: Legal Transplants and Signaling
- American Moment[s]: When, How, and Why Did Israeli Law Faculties Come to Resemble Elite U.S. Law Schools?
- Foreign Law Between "Grand Hazard" and Great Irritation: The Bulgarian Experience After 1878
- Legal Transplants and the Frontiers of Legal Knowledge
- Western Legal Imperialism: Thinking About the Deep Historical Roots
Articles in the same Issue
- Article
- Introduction
- The Concept of Law: A Western Transplant?
- Transplantation and Mutation in Anglo-American Trust Law
- Transplants and Timing: Passages in the Creation of an Anglo-American Law of Slavery
- Deciding Against Conciliation: The Nineteenth-Century Rejection of a European Transplant and the Rise of a Distinctively American Ideal of Adversarial Adjudication
- The Invention of Legal Primitivism
- Race, Marriage, and Sovereignty in the New World Order
- Constitutional Transplants
- Some Reflections on the Transplantation of British Company Law in Post-Ottoman Palestine
- Jefferson Goes East: The American Origins of the Israeli Declaration of Independence
- Argonauts of the Eastern Mediterranean: Legal Transplants and Signaling
- American Moment[s]: When, How, and Why Did Israeli Law Faculties Come to Resemble Elite U.S. Law Schools?
- Foreign Law Between "Grand Hazard" and Great Irritation: The Bulgarian Experience After 1878
- Legal Transplants and the Frontiers of Legal Knowledge
- Western Legal Imperialism: Thinking About the Deep Historical Roots
