Marriage, Law and Modernity: Global Histories

Description

Marriage, Law and Modernity offers a global perspective on the modern history of marriage. Widespread recent debate has focused on the changing nature of families, characterized by both the rise of unmarried cohabitation and the legalization of same-sex marriage. However, historical understanding of these developments remains limited. How has marriage come to be the target of national legislation? Are recent policies on same-sex marriage part of a broader transformation? And, has marriage come to be similar across the globe despite claims about national, cultural and religious difference? This collection brings together scholars from across the world in order to offer a global perspective on the history of marriage. It unites legal, political and social history, and seeks to draw out commonalities and differences by exploring connections through empire, international law and international migration.

Julia Moses is Senior Lecturer in Modern History at the University of Sheffield, UK. She is the author of The First Modern Risk: Workplace Accidents and the Origins of European Welfare States (2018) and the co-editor of The Impact of Ideas on Legal Development (2012).

This is an enormously rich trousseau of legal histories of marriage and human rights from all continents, by an eminent gathering of historians. * Goeran Therborn, Professor Emeritus of Sociology, University of Cambridge, UK, author of Between Sex and Power: Family in the World, 1900-2000 * Using the lens of legal, political, and religious discourses over marriage, the contributors to Marriage, Law and Modernity shed fascinating new light on the complex and highly contested nature of larger processes of "modernization" and "globalization" since the eighteenth century. This volume is a highly valuable source for anyone interested in the history of gender, colonialism, and the modern state and its laws. * Julia Roos, Associate Professor of History, Indiana University Bloomington, USA *