ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts covered in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores the realities of how British laws and British constitutional concepts were engaged, and engaged with, around empire. It looks at the ways in which laws engage in empire - the laws of the colonizer and the laws and places of the colonized. The book looks at the legacies of empire. It examines the engagement of British and American common and statute law, French civil law and Native law in court cases about the limits and powers of labour contracts in the Upper Mississippi River Valley. Historians outside the settler states have written accounts of the deployment of law in the places of the empire from within, using local materials to question the extent to which law was imposed, and to question the ways in which new colonial subjects actively engaged with and subverted new colonial institutions, including legal institutions.
