A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org This sweeping book details the extent to which the legal revolution emanating from the US has transformed legal hierarchies of power across the globe, while also analyzing the conjoined global histories of law and social change from the Middle Ages to today. It examines the global proliferation of large corporate law firms-a US invention-along with US legal education approaches geared toward those corporate law firms. This neoliberal-inspired revolution attacks complacent legal oligarchies in the name of America-inspired modernism. Drawing on the combined histories of the legal profession, imperial transformations, and the enduring and conservative role of cosmopolitan elites at the top of legal hierarchies, the book details case studies in India, Hong Kong, South Korea, Japan, and China to explain how interconnected legal histories are stories of both revolution and reproduction. Theoretically and methodologically ambitious, it offers a wholly new approach to studying interrelated fields across time and geographies.

The global operations of the East India Companies were profoundly shaped by European perceptions of foreign lands. Providing a cultural perspective absent from existing economic and institutional histories, Ethnography and Encounter is the first book to systematically explore how Company agents' understandings of and attitudes towards Asian peoples and societies informed institutional approaches to trade, diplomacy, and colonial governance. Its fine-grained comparisons of Dutch and English activities in seventeenth-century South Asia show how corporate ethnography was produced, how it underpinned given modes of conduct, and how it illuminates connections across space and time. Ethnography and Encounter identifies deep commonalities between Dutch and English discourses and practices, their indebtedness to pan-European ethnographic traditions, and their centrality to wider histories of European expansion.

This book offers the first in-depth investigation into the relationship between the National Birth Control Association, later the Family Planning Association, and contraceptive science and technology in the pre-Pill era. It explores the Association's role in designing and supporting scientific research, employment of scientists, engagement with manufacturers and pharmaceutical companies, and use of its facilities, patients, staff, medical, scientific, and political networks to standardise and guarantee contraceptive technology it prescribed and produced. By taking a micro-history approach to the archives of the Association, this book highlights the importance of this organisation to the history of science, technology, and medicine in twentieth-century Britain. It examines the Association's participation within Western family planning networks, working particularly closely with its American counterparts to develop chemical and biological means of testing contraception for efficacy, quality, and safety.