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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Book Review: Princely Brothers And Sisters: The Sibling Bond In German Politics, Joseph P. Huffman
Book Review: Princely Brothers And Sisters: The Sibling Bond In German Politics, Joseph P. Huffman
History Educator Scholarship
Much has been made of wider kinship networks and their roles in medieval aristocratic political life, yet lit-tle attention has been given to relations between the closest lifetime kin: siblings. Jonathan R. Lyon provides an engaging study of the most prominent aristocratic families in the German Kingdom between 1138 and 1250, making the case that networks of brothers, and sisters (to a lesser degree), served successfully to curb the authority of Staufen kings and emperors. Lyon challenges the normative European model of lineal descent and title holding based on primogeniture by pointing out that medieval German aristocrats prac-ticed partible inheritance. …
Social Hierarchies And The Formation Of Customary Property Law In Pre-Industrial China And England, Taisu Zhang
Social Hierarchies And The Formation Of Customary Property Law In Pre-Industrial China And England, Taisu Zhang
Faculty Scholarship
Comparative lawyers and economists have often assumed that traditional Chinese laws and customs reinforced the economic and political dominance of elites and, therefore, were unusually “despotic” towards the poor. Such assumptions are highly questionable: Quite the opposite, one of the most striking characteristics of Qing and Republican property institutions is that they often gave significantly greater economic protection to the poorer segments of society than comparable institutions in early modern England. In particular, Chinese property customs afforded much stronger powers of redemption to landowners who had pawned their land. In both societies, land-pawning occurred far more frequently among poorer households …