Colonial Adventures: Commercial Law and Practice in the Making

Colonial Adventures: Commercial Law and Practice in the Making addresses the question how and to what extend the development of commercial law and practice, from Ancient Greece to the colonial empires of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, were indebted to colonial expansion and maritime trade. Illustrated by experiences in Ancient Europe, the Americas, Asia, Africa and Australia, the book examines how colonial powers, whether consciously or not, reshaped the law in order to foster the prosperity of homeland manufacturers and entrepreneurs or how local authorities and settlers brought the transplanted law in line with the colonial objectives and the local constraints amid shifting economic, commercial and political realities.

Contributors are: Alain Clément (†), Alexander Claver, Oscar Cruz-Barney, Bas De Roo, Paul du Plessis, Bernard Durand, David Gilles, Petra Mahy, David Mirhady, M. C. Mirow, Luigi Nuzzo, Phillip Lipton, Umakanth Varottil, and Jakob Zollmann.

Serge Dauchy is Research Director at the CNRS (Lille) and Professor of Legal History at the University Saint-Louis of Brussels. His main research topics are the history of civil procedure, comparative history of central courts and the legal history of Québec and Louisiana.

Heikki Pihlajamäki is Professor of Comparative Legal History at the University of Helsinki. He has published extensively on the legal history of Scandinavia, Europe and America, including Conquest and the Law in Swedish Livonia (ca. 1630-1710): A Case of Legal Pluralism in Early Modern Europe (Brill, 2017).

Albrecht Cordes is Professor of Medieval and Early Modern Legal History and Civil Law at Goethe University Frankfurt/Main. His research is especially focused on the history of commercial law, Hanseatic legal history and the history of conflict resolution.

Dave De ruysscher is Associate Professor at Tilburg University and Vrije Universiteit Brussels. As a legal historian and lawyer, he specializes in the history of commercial and private law of the Early Modern period and the nineteenth century.