This thesis explores the connection between legal history and social history through an analysis of commercial, property and criminal laws, and their practical operation, in Nevada County, California from 1849 to 1860 and the Gympie region, Queensland from 1867 to 1880. By explaining the operation of a broad range of laws in a local context, this thesis seeks to provide a more complete picture of the operation of law in each community and identify the ways in which the law influenced social, political and economic life. The history of law cannot be separate from its social, economic, geographic, and political context. Each of these factors influenced both the text of the laws, and their practical application. In the Gympie region and Nevada County, the law had the effect of, in various guises, safeguarding private property, promoting short term productivity, and enforcing public morality. This was often at the expense of individual autonomy, the physical environment and the rights of minority groups. This was not a result of the operation of one dominant force in the lawmaking process. Instead, government regulation, government inactivity, informal customs, and judicial lawmaking worked together to create a legal order on either side of the Pacific. The comparison reveals that the same pattern of tensions gave the legal regime in each region a substantially similar shape. At another level, this thesis demonstrates that two regions, although on different continents and separated by a 20 year time gap, were nevertheless linked across time and space. By comparing the regions, this thesis demonstrates the possibilities of a more international legal history. While there were certainly differences between each region, these differences should not obscure the substantial similarities, and the fact that an analysis of these similarities illuminates the shared influences between the regions. By conceiving of legal regimes as being shaped by shifting patterns tensions, defining the pattern of those tensions, and then connecting those patterns across national borders it is possible to write a more complex, interesting, and transnational version of legal history.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/279066 |
| Date | January 2010 |
| Creators | Chapple, Simon James, History & Philosophy, Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences, UNSW |
| Publisher | Awarded by:University of New South Wales. History & Philosophy |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | Copyright Chapple Simon James., http://unsworks.unsw.edu.au/copyright |
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