Dr. Seigler has done a highly commendable job in producing a detailed biography on the life of Sir Ellis Clarke. His work, Sir Ellis Clarke: A Royal Son of the Soil is insightful, thought-provoking, and written in a reader-friendly style." Dr. Lawrence Rossow, Former Dean, University of Houston-Victoria. "Sir Ellis Clarke: A Royal Son of the Soil is an eloquent biography that introduces Americans to the life of Sir Ellis Clarke, a modern-day Founding Father of Trinidad and Tobago. Readers in the United States and around the world will be the likely beneficiaries of Dr. Seigler's insight into how Sir Ellis' struggle to devise a workable constitution for his own nation, might illuminate the constitutional jurisprudence of the United States." Dr. Harvey Hinton, Former Assistant professor of Social Studies at North Carolina Central University

This book explores the legal culture of the Parsis, or Zoroastrians, an ethnoreligious community unusually invested in the colonial legal system of British India and Burma. Rather than trying to maintain collective autonomy and integrity by avoiding interaction with the state, the Parsis sank deep into the colonial legal system itself. From the late eighteenth century until India's independence in 1947, they became heavy users of colonial law, acting as lawyers, judges, litigants, lobbyists, and legislators. They de-Anglicized the law that governed them and enshrined in law their own distinctive models of the family and community by two routes: frequent intra-group litigation often managed by Parsi legal professionals in the areas of marriage, inheritance, religious trusts, and libel, and the creation of legislation that would become Parsi personal law. Other South Asian communities also turned to law, but none seems to have done so earlier or in more pronounced ways than the Parsis.

The history and theory of international law have been transformed in recent years by post-colonial and post-imperial critiques of the universalistic claims of Western international law. The origins of those critiques lie in the often overlooked work of the remarkable Polish-British lawyer-historian C. H. Alexandrowicz (1902-75). This volume collects Alexandrowicz's shorter historical writings, on subjects from the law of nations in pre-colonial India to the New International Economic Order of the 1970s, and presents them as a challenging portrait of early modern and modern world history seen through the lens of the law of nations. The book includes the first complete bibliography of Alexandrowicz's writings and the first biographical and critical introduction to his life and works. It reveals the formative influence of his Polish roots and early work on canon law for his later scholarship undertaken in Madras (1951-61) and Sydney (1961-67) and the development of his thought regarding sovereignty, statehood, self-determination, and legal personality, among many other topics still of urgent interest to international lawyers, political theorists, and global historians.

This is the second of two volumes of papers selected from those given at the 12th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics. The first is New Perspectives on English Historical Linguistics (1): Syntax and Morphology. Together the volumes provide an overview of many of the issues that are currently engaging practitioners in the field. In this volume, the primary concern is with the historical study of the English lexicon and its sound and writing systems. Using research tools such as machine-readable text and lexical corpora, and intellectual tools such as corpus and cognitive linguistics, many of the papers move from a close study of a set of data to conclusions of theoretical significance, often concerning questions of classification and organisation. More broadly, whether concerned with lexicology or transmission, the papers have a social orientation, since neither lexicology nor phonology can be seen as divorced from its social setting.

As the premier livery company, the Mercers Company in medieval England enjoyed a prominent role in London's governance and exercised much influence over England's overseas trade and political interests. This substantial two-volume set provides a comprehensive edition of the surviving Mercers' accounts from 1347 to 1464, and opens a unique window into the day-to-day workings of one of England's most powerful institutions at the height of its influence. The accounts list income, derived from fees for apprentices and entry fees, from fines (whose cause is usually given, sometimes with many details), from gifts and bequests, from property rents, and from other sources, and then list expenditures: on salaries to priests and chaplains, to the beadle, the rent-collector, and to scribes and scriveners; on alms payments; on quit-rents due on their properties; on repairs to properties; and on a whole host of other costs, differing from year to year, and including court cases, special furnishings for the chapel or Hall, negotiations over trade with Burgundy, transport costs, funeral costs or those for attendance at state occasions, etc. Included also in some years are ordinances, deeds and other material of which they wanted to ensure a record was kept. Beginning with an early account for 1347-48, and the company's ordinances of that year, the accounts preserved form an entire block from 1390 until 1464. The material is arranged in facing-page format, with an accurate edition of the original text mirrored by a translation into modern English. A substantial introduction describes the manuscripts in full detail and explains the accounting system used by the Mercers and the financial vocabulary associated with it. Exhaustive name and subject indexes ensure that the material is easily accessible and this edition will become an essential tool for all studying the social, cultural or economic developments of late-medieval England.