Von der Europäischen Rechtsgeschichte zu einer Rechtsgeschichte Europas in globalhistorischer Perspektive

Abstract

For decades, European Legal History has been a strong field of scholarship on the history of law in a transnational perspective. It has been shaped especially by German-speaking scholars such as Emil Seckel, Paul Koschaker, Franz Wieacker, and Helmut Coing, and it was set up in the context of European post-war projects of political integration. To this day, we build upon this tradition. Like all historical scholarship, European Legal History was part of a broad communicative process of identity-building. It depicted European Legal Culture as something clearly distinct from other traditions.
In the last years though, postcolonial studies and scholars engaged in Transnational and Global History criticized harshly the very fundaments of European historiography. Thus, European Legal History faces serious challenges regarding some of its fundamental assumptions: What was its underlying vision of Europe? What are its intellectual and conceptual foundations? How does it address allegations of Eurocentrism and epistemic colonialism? How does it respond to the postulation of a necessity to provincialize European history? How do we define the relationship of European to Transnational and Global Legal History? – These and other related questions will be addressed by the following considerations. They will focus on a critical review of the academic tradition on European Legal History, its conceptual foundations and its historical context (1. Part, 1.–6.). As a result of this critical assessment, and taking into account findings of the debate on Global History, I present an outline of some starting points and possible assignments for a Legal History of Europe in Global Historical Perspective, which can build upon some results of the tradition, but has to be conceptualized necessarily in a different way (2. Part, 7.–11.).