What is global legal history?

Abstract

Legal history, as developed in nineteenth-century continental Europe, has a national tradition, but also a transnational past. During the last two decades, however, a new field of global legal history has emerged, not least as a response to Eurocentrism, methodological nationalism and the current reality of transnational and global law. In this article, I map some historiographic traditions of transnational legal history and the emerging field of global legal history, pointing out some important methodological problems and suggesting a knowledge-historical approach. It ends with a definition of global legal history as a critical history of the production of multinormative knowledge, understood as a process of distributed knowledge production through cultural translation, comprising theory and practice, drawing on a wide range of sources, on a transnational scale, with special attention for the dialectics of glocalisation.