Religion, Race, Rights: Landmarks in the History of Modern Anglo-American Law

Religion, Race, Rights is a rewriting of the history of modern western law. Challenging the assumption that law is an objective, rational and secular enterprise, it shows that the rule of law is historically intertwined with Christian morality, the forces of capitalism responsible for exploiting minorities, and conceptions of individualism bound up in the 16th century Reformation and rapidly developed in the Enlightenment in the 17th and 18th centuries. Drawing upon landmark legal decisions and historical events, the book emphasises that justice is not blind, because our concept of justice changes over time and is linked to economic power, social values, and moral sensibilities that are neither universal nor apolitical. The author's focus on the historical interconnections between religion, race and rights shines a bright light on contemporary legal issues and foregrounds the cultural specificity of western legal concepts. Moreover Darian-Smith shows how, in a global political economy, Anglo-American law is not always transportable, transferable, or translatable across political landscapes and religious communities.