ABSTRACT
Henry Maine was the most important English figure in a generation of legal theorists who founded the comparative study of "early" social institutions. Early Roman law and contemporary Hindu custom encapsulated primitive Indo-European institutions, notably the patriarchal family and the communal organisation of property rights. Maine's arguments were developed in part as a contribution to contemporary political debate, especially with reference to the Indian Empire. The race theorists were generally medical men. The writers who developed a model of "primitive society" in the second half of the nineteenth century were mostly jurists. Savigny, a conservative Prussian nobleman, achieved early fame with a pamphlet published in 1814 which attacked the proposal to codify the civil law of the newly united German state. The future of India, perhaps the central political question of the mid-fifties, raised legal and philosophical issues of intense interest.
