Law, History, Text: Writing Ironic Legal Histories

This book presents a fresh approach to the writing of legal history as an essentially textual enterprise. It argues that to write any history is to tell a story. In doing so, it appreciates the place not just of context and contingency in the history of law but also of humanity. Law is a human creation, for which reason it accommodates both reason and romance. Absent sensibility, it makes no sense. This book accordingly tells four stories about law. A first revisits a familiar institution, the English monarchy. A second reads history through the lens of a particular author, Daniel Defoe. A third writes a history of a few hundred yards of Bristol, eighteenth-century England's premier slave-port. A fourth investigates a peculiar, and hideous, fantasy. Engaging texts drawn from literature, philosophy, and politics, as well as law, this work will appeal to any scholar or student interested not just in the past of law but also in its imagining and inscription.