State Law and Legal Positivism

This volume formulates the hypothesis of a truly global revolution that reflected a Great Divide between ancient and new legal regimes. The volume brings together several case studies of transition from an ancient to a new legal regime characterized by the positivization of the law. This was an effect of Western imperialism, but also of local elites’ conviction that positive law was an efficient instrument of governance. The contributors emphasize the depth and scale of the positivist legal revolution and explore the phenomenon whether it was the outcome of either direct colonialism (Morocco, Egypt, India) or indigenous reformism (Ottoman empire, China, Japan).

Baudouin Dupret is Directeur de Recherche at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), based at the institute Les Afriques dans le Monde, Bordeaux (France), and guest lecturer at the University of Louvain (Belgium). He has published extensively in the field of the sociology and anthropology of law in the Muslim world. He (co-)edited numerous volumes, the most recent one being Legal Rules in Practice (with J. Colemans and M. Travers, Routledge, 2020), and single-authored several books, including Positive Law from the Muslim World (Cambridge University Press, 2021).

Jean-Louis Halpérin, Ph. D. (1985), University Paris II, is currently Professor of legal history at the Ecole Normale supérieure - Paris Siences Lettres. He has published monographs and many articles on European and Asian legal history, including Five Legal Revolutions since the 17th Century. A Analysis of Global Legal History(Springer, 2014).

Contributors are: Léon Buskens, Jean-Philippe Dequen, Baudouin Dupret, Jean-Louis Halpérin, Béatrice Jaluzot, Gianluca Parolin, Avi Rubin, and Tzung-Mou Wu.

"(This book) includes numerous local case studies involving direct colonialism (Morocco and India) and indigenous reformism (Ottoman Empire, China, and Japan), with a slight emphasis on the Islamic world […] not only conducts a global exploration of the legal positivism as a new paradigm but also vividly illuminates this dilemma faced by legal research from a global perspective."

----Fupeng Li & Zijian Zheng, in: Comparative Legal History (2023) 11(2), pp. 280-286