Chapter 10 surveys the history, the concepts and the institutions of property in premodern India, China, the Near East, Egypt, Greece and Rome. Formal rules of ownership and inheritance formed the basis of all premodern legal regimes and undergirded economic performance (for instance, growth), as has been frequently stressed by New Institutional Economists. The enforcement of property rights reveals a good deal about the diverse economies, environments and cultures of premodern societies. The chapter summarizes the sources for property rights, which are rich and varied; and the control and use of resources occupy a considerable part of private legal documentation in all premodern systems that have yielded written material.

Not all ontological concerns which surround the concept of (customary) international law (CIL) have disappeared, rather they have shifted. Whereas the existence of a genuine international legal system is taken as a ‘given’, questions still remain about its genesis and the position of CIL within it. Some, for example, still question whether we can truly speak of customary international law, while others recast the concept of CIL through a formalist perspective. Accordingly, formalism, in its moderate form, treats formal sources, documents and/or proclamations as ‘better’ tools for both (a) the preservation of existing rules of CIL and (b) the ‘creation’ of new legal rules. At its more extreme, formalism purports the view that (c) IL (or even CIL) finds its genesis only in formal sources, documents or proclamations. While some formalisation is undeniably helpful and even necessary, we should be more critical of this formalist paradigm. In this way, the chapter seeks to respond to these positions through a revival of the legacy of Sir Henry Maine and the evolutionary conception of law for which he laid out the first foundation. By operationalising this conceptualisation, a new vision spawns for CIL: a vision beyond mere formalism.

This chapter examines J. S. Mill’s writings on universal history, beginning with his reviews of Jules Michelet, François Guizot, and Henry Buckle, and ending with Alexis de Tocqueville’s prophetic account of democracy and Mill’s timely socialism. Barrell argues that we must take seriously the two historical perspectives from which Mill theorised politics: the first looked to the special causes which determined the timeliness or untimeliness of a given doctrine, reform, or phenomenon, while the latter looked to general causes and the region of ultimate aims. The first depended logically on the second. Any attempt to historicise the study of politics – by making laws relative to time and place, for example – must reckon with civilisation’s provisional trends. The debate surrounding Mill’s universalism and relativism, Barrell concludes, can be helpfully understood in these terms. While Mill’s argument is difficult to credulously follow, his intentions were clear: general and special circumstances always coexisted, and because they coexisted the past was both irreducibly distinct and uniform in its development. One consequence of this intellectual remapping might be to re-establish continuities between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in keeping with Mill’s self-professed eclecticism.