Research Project

The Role of Law in the Great Divergence and Emergence of the Modern World

In the existing literature on the breakthrough to modernity and the “great divergence,” a considerable number of scholars, also known as “institutionalists,” have attributed the “rise of the West” to legal and institutional factors, particularly secure property rights. Although these scholars have received important impulses from Enlightenment thinkers such as Montesquieu, Quesnay and Locke as well as 19th and 20th century luminaries such as Hegel, Marx and Weber, institutionalism specially took off with the work of Douglass North. In recent years, it has been most prominently embraced and further developed by academics such as Avner Greif, Timur Kuran, Geoffrey Hodgson, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson.

In the past decades, a number of important works have been published on 16th to 19th century legal practices in India and the Indian Ocean world by scholars such Irfan Habib, Farhat Hasan, Nandini Chatterjee, Mahmood Kooria, Fahad Bishara and many others. However, while “early modern” Ottoman and China’s legal framework have received some attention in the “great divergence” debate, we still lack systematic examinations of pre-colonial India to this regard, above all when it comes to comparisons with European “core areas” such as England, France and the Netherlands.

During the fellowship, I plan to work on two related but distinct problems: 1. The role of law in the breakthrough to modernity and the “great divergence”, i.e. the reasons behind the “rise of the West” in general and the English Industrial Revolution in particular from an “Indian perspective” – namely 17th and 18th century Mughal and post-Mughal India (notably Gujarat in northwestern India and late 18th century Mysore in the southwest of the subcontinent); 2. I intend to examine the role of these regions’ rules and regulations in order to detect their legal framework’s “level of modernity”. As to Mughal and post-Mughal India, specifically Gujarat and Mysore’s legal framework, as well as their judicial “level of modernity”, I would like to further inspect the following aspects: a) property rights; b) the role of the state and the different administrations’ rules and regulations regarding “secular” and religious (i.e. theocratic) decrees; c) civil and criminal penalties; d) the rights of women and e) caste discrimination.