This chapter argues for custom as the predominant historical and experiential form in 1859 and looks at its treatment in J. S. Mill’s On Liberty, Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, and Eliot’s Adam Bede. In Dickens, custom acts as a measure of the violence of the revolution; in Mill and Eliot, it is at the heart of their examination of identity and culture. Mill sees the ‘despotism of custom’ as essentially opposed to progress and individual liberty, but for Eliot, it is at the heart of community and needs to be recognised and accommodated by her most exemplary characters; it is a historical category that is commonly available and universally participated in. It enables all citizens equally to access the discourse of the historical and the experience of ‘society as incarnate history’. Eliot argues implicitly in Adam Bede that custom is fundamental to all human experience.

November 1859 saw the publication and initial serialisation of some of the most influential and enduring books of the nineteenth century, including The Woman in White, which began serialisation in November; the first parts of Beeton’s Book of Household Management; Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help; and Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. The chapter considers the reception of Darwin’s work before looking at how each of these texts is centrally concerned with modes of change, and history. It argues that Beeton and Smiles show how custom can enable change, and that Darwin and Collins share an interest in a non-religious world-view that might in itself force change. All these texts also provoke questions of originality and adaptation, and raise the question of how far originality is actually a possibility. A Shakespeare burlesque shows how texts, along with custom itself, mutate over time.

The Introduction explores the concept of the year book and some of its recent iterations. It sets out the major concerns of this work, which is essentially to read texts, events, and lives through the shared medium of 1859. It sets out the relationship between the three key themes of the book, that is, custom and the experience of history, the relationship between the individual and the collective, and the life and writings of George Eliot, and introduces the argument that will shape the work. This concerns the workings of history and of its dominant form in 1859: custom. The Preface also sets out the methodology of the book and draws on Raphael Samuel’s description of history as an ‘organic form of knowledge’ that ideally draws on multiple sources of information, and on accounts of lived experience and emotions too. In this last respect, literature clearly acts as a great resource.

This chapter deals with the question of the sources of international law, that is, how one distinguishes between what is law and what is not. This is governed essentially by art. 38(1) of the Statute of the International Court of Justice. Historically, the first source is custom, which is composed of two elements: the actual conduct of states and the belief that such conduct is carried out in the belief that it is ‘law’. What is counted as state practice is examined, as is the critical belief requirement (opinio juris), which is often harder to ascertain. The process of change is discussed, as is the concept of local or regional custom. The second source, of increasing importance today, is international agreements or treaties, which are binding on all states parties to the particular agreement and is the focus of a later chapter. The third source is termed ‘general principles of law’, which seeks to cover gaps in the law by recourse to accepted principles of the system or of domestic law and includes the notion of equity. Finally, the chapter looks at subsidiary means for the determination of law, including judicial decisions and writings. Other possible sources of law are noted, and the work of the UN International Law Commission is referenced.

The revisionist school has asserted that pre-colonial indigenous polities were fluid shadow entities and that pre-British South Asian regimes had no law. This line of argument claims that unique conditions of India prevented the emergence of states with well-defined contiguous territories possessing centralised governments. Ironically this view is reminiscent of colonial British scholars’ argument about pre-colonial India. The argument that pre-British India had no laws and that the ruler’s will was the ultimate authority is incorrect. Rulers of pre-British indigenous polities did not operate in a vacuum, but had to take into account long-established practices, existing procedures and the presence of local powerbrokers. Arabic discourse for the Delhi Sultanate and Turko-Mongol conventions for the Mughals, along with local custom, shaped the legal history of medieval India’s militaries. Overall, the political theorists of the Delhi Sultanate, the Mughal Empire and the ‘Hindu’ dynasties accepted the pivotal role of the monarchy and the army in shaping the structure of interpolity relationships.

The sale, twice, of a Medici cabinet ordered for an English estate introduces the modern idea of heritage, initiated by Edmund Burke. It covers Protestant narratives and customary laws, and concludes with Alasdair MacIntyre’s thesis about narrative and identity.

How did ambitious projects of wetland improvement give rise to a new kind of environmental politics in early modern England? This chapter first asks how such projects reconfigure understandings of when, where, and how environmental change took place in this period. Environmental acts were political, it argues, because they relied on and engendered relationships of power: decision-making institutions, laws, legitimacy, and – above all – negotiation and conflict. It next explores what kind of politics were at work in imagining, implementing, and contesting wetland improvement. In emphasising material and institutional progress, studies of ‘improvement’ and ‘the state’ have often overlooked the contingent processes through which productivity and power were made and disputed on the ground. Mobilising custom as a practice and right, wetland communities played a vital role in the trajectory of improvement. Conflict over improvement exposed the contested nature of political authority in seventeenth-century England and generated material landscapes of flux. Finally, this chapter examines how speech acted and actions spoke to remake wetlands via print, maps, institutions, and environments.

Wetlands have deep geological histories, stories of bedrock, sediment, and sea rise. But the direction and speed of flow has been shaped just as surely by human interests and intervention. This chapter asks how wetland commons were used, managed, and disputed in the centuries and decades prior to improvement projects. Moving from the action of ice sheets and mosses to national legislation and daily work, it examines how environmental and political scales intersected. By the late sixteenth century, communities in the northern fens faced amplified flood risks and conflict over shared commons. But these challenges did not necessarily strengthen intervention by state-sanctioned institutions capable of coordinating at a larger scale. A less linear and more fragmented picture emerges in the northern fens, where environmental politics pivoted on rights and responsibilities defined by local custom. Fen custom was reproduced by communal decision-making and participatory acts of walking, remembering, and working. It formed a flexible fabric, adapted in response to dynamic waterways and porous boundaries and negotiated through confrontations on riverbanks as well as courtrooms.

If drainage aimed to free land from the vagaries of floodwater, then enclosure was necessary exclude commoners and transfer management of land to improving landlords and tenants. The development of ‘absolute’ private property in early modern England has often been analysed via legal categories or socio-economic outcomes. Resituating property-making as an environmental act, this chapter argues that the contested exercise of land rights in Hatfield Level relied on the ability to determine how water moved, where cattle could graze, and what kind of plants grew. It traces the words and practices through which commoners and improvers defined their rights, often hinging on disputes about the just distribution of resources. This chapter explores a spectrum of local responses to improvement, including complaints of scarcity, socially fraught adaptation, and action to reinforce customary rights. As disputes over enclosure escalated, physical acts of cultivation and grazing became means by rival groups asserted ‘right’ as jurisdiction and legitimacy. In doing so, they created contrasting environments, generative of different social, economic, and political relations.

How did mapping and measurement act as technologies of improvement? By the early seventeenth century, a professional class of surveyors had emerged in England, promoting concepts of geometric justice in print. They also integrated their services into crown estate management, promising to make forest and fen commons profitable. Much has been written about the spread of cartographic literacy among early modern elites, but relatively little is known about how local communities interacted with maps, surveys, and their makers. Fen projects brought the geometric techniques of improvement into contact with local customary knowledge. Examining maps and surveys of the northern fens across three centuries, this chapter traces how they were produced; how they re-organised social environments; and how fen communities negotiated these processes. It situates surveying as one epistemological tool within disputes over the redrawing of land and water in Hatfield Level, which involved legal officials, written documents, crowds, experiential knowledge, and oral testimony. Intended to author and authorise improvement, the boundaries that maps and surveys demarcated did not prove stable.

What should we make of the dramatic appearance of the Leveller leader John Lilburne in Hatfield Level in 1651, at the height of a decade of anti-improvement riots? This unusual contact between central radicalism and rural unrest destabilises binaries between a zealous minority driving civil war conflict and indifferent provincial subjects. Fen projects instead expose the pluralism of political ideas in seventeenth-century England. These crown-led ventures polarised notions of justice and became entangled in the events and debates propelling the English civil wars. In Epworth Manor, commoners across the social spectrum asserted an inalienable ‘just right’ to wetland commons in the face of royal and republican coercion. The strength of customary politics extended far beyond the parish, becoming a powerful means to articulate opposition to improvement in conflicts that moved between wetlands and Westminster. Central governors ultimately struggled to exercise a monopoly over legitimacy or violence in Epworth, where collective action across almost a century repelled efforts to turn their commons into theatres of state power and national productivity.

Chapter 4 charts the provision and/or absence of instruction in Catholicism in the cultural worlds of the Pacific, which the bishops of Popayán framed as “spiritual pasture.” It begins with an analysis of the patterns of baptism and godparentage in the small city of Cartago, far from the gold mines where enslaved labourers shored up the white elite. The chapter examines two controversies that divided the mine and slave-owning elite and the upper echelons of the Church for decades; first, a debate over the stipend system in which slaveholders had to pay itinerant clergy to travel to the mines to administer the sacraments, and second, over mineros allowing enslaved people to work on holy days, despite myriad laws and papal bulls outlawing it. Ultimately, the remoteness of the mines from towns, and the disinterest of whites in settling there, meant that enslavers continued the long-held custom of enslaved people labouring on holy days and saving up gold dust to pacify them. Condemned by the bishops as “spiritual abandonment,” the custom helped to create conditions for the growth of the large free black population and perhaps the practice of their own religions that largely remain outside of view.

The Conclusion recapitulates and offers an additional framing of the book’s findings. Perpignan’s history in the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries had been dominated by efforts to adhere to the past, whether in the form of the town’s customs or the communal charter of 1197. Those efforts had been predicated on the assumptions that old was good, and that old was better than new. During the long fifteenth century, however, Perpignan no longer valued custom as it once had. In matters of municipal government, it no longer tried to adhere to the communal charter; as regards the ma armada, it could not prevent French and Aragonese kings from suppressing it and from taking control of the municipal government. Most importantly, townspeople began to operate according to new principles: the new was better than old, that the future could consist only of unpredictable change, and that what existed in the present would almost certainly have to be altered in the future. They became temporal relativists, and they did so before the sixteenth-century emergence of relativist thinking in European high culture.

Chapter 5 focuses on the period stretching from the Catalonian Civil War’s outbreak into the early sixteenth century. The civil war led to Perpignan’s conquest by France and three decades of nearly continuous French rule, followed by the town’s return to the Crown of Aragon. This chapter examines how these experiences affected matters treated in the preceding chapters. Although kings of France and Aragon fought each other for control of Perpignan, they pursued similar policies there during and after the civil war. They eliminated twelfth- and thirteenth-century customs and privileges on an unprecedented scale, including the foundational ma armada. And they assumed a thoroughgoing control of municipal elections, especially with King Ferdinand II’s establishment of a system that he called insaculation, and that I will call royal insaculation to differentiate it from earlier forms of insaculation. Together, the lasting suppression of the ma armada and the imposition of royal insaculation constituted the royal state’s triumph.

This chapter explores the intricate legal concepts of co-ownership and neighbour relations under Chinese property law. The first section delves into co-ownership, explaining its categories: co-ownership by shares and common ownership. It discusses the rights and obligations of co-owners, the management of co-owned property and the legal remedies available for disputes. The chapter highlights how co-ownership can be established through contracts, partnerships and familial relationships, and examines how these relationships influence the management and division of property.

The second section focuses on neighbour relations, covering the concept and content of neighbour rights. It outlines the principles governing these rights, such as facilitating production and ensuring convenient living while balancing fairness and reasonableness. The chapter discusses the impact of civil customs on neighbour relations, providing case studies to illustrate how local practices influence legal decisions. By examining these elements, the chapter provides a comprehensive overview of how co-ownership and neighbour relations are regulated, emphasising the importance of harmony and co-operation in property management and dispute resolution.