James Muir, Law, Debt, and Merchant Power: The Civil Courts of Eighteenth-Century Halifax (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016)
Joseph Wallace
2019
Left history
James Muir traces Halifax's transformation into a "merchantocracy" during the eighteenth century. Muir's exploration of the rise of the merchant class situates his work in a storied "tradition of economic analysis" that, among more recent analytical modes, encompasses Marxist, Weberian, and Schumpeterian traditions. As a legal historian, Muir concludes that civil courts assisted in the development of bourgeois "hegemony" during the Confederation period. Muir focuses in particular on the
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... Court of Common Pleas during the 1750s and 1760s, finding that structural and procedural advantages for plaintiffs seeking to sue for debt played a larger role in shaping this "merchantocracy" than any substantive laws that directly favoured mercantile interests (7, 8, 25, 27, 188). According to Muir, merchants rose to prominence in the social hierarchy not by linear progression and not through dialectical confrontations with other social classes. Instead, Muir interrogates how a range of social strata participated as litigants, juries, and judges in the bourgeois development of civil law. Dynamic legal interactions among merchants, artisans, and others produced greater acquiescence in a system that favoured merchant interests, since credit flowed downward from the economic actors most enmeshed in Atlantic trade networks. Particularly for a population of transient Haligonians that lacked other social bonds, acquiescence in merchantocracy emerged from the perception that the adjudicative process required consistent legal outcomes to resolve civil disputes effectively. Courts formed the social centre where all members of commercial society resolved disputes in relatively humdrum fashion. Resort to litigation, according to Muir, signified "continuation of market transactions in another forum," rather than rupture of business relations or evidence of class conflict. As a consequence, litigation soared to unprecedented rates in Halifax. Muir finds that Haligonians sued at higher rates in this period than both the English and the colonists of the Anglophone-and Francophone-speaking regions of North America (4, 12, 97, 126,(183)(184)(185)(186)(187)(188)(189)(190). Historians will find Muir's thorough analysis of two decades of civil litigation to be illuminating as a definitive study of civil court operations of the eighteenth-century, not just in Halifax but throughout the Anglo-Atlantic world. As Muir points out, Law, Debt, and Merchant Power marks "the first study that recreates the full breadth of the civil law procedures in any common law jurisdiction in the eighteenth century." For historians more concerned with other commercial centres of the Atlantic world, Muir's corpus of data on civil litigation should yield fascinating comparative insights. As a source base, Muir primarily relies on minute books
doi:10.25071/1913-9632.39497
fatcat:72vz32add5bepkwruvttejcfcu