Marriage, Law and Modernity

Julia Moses is Senior Lecturer in Modern History at the University of Sheffield, UK. She is the author of The First Modern Risk: Workplace Accidents and the Origins of European Welfare States (2018) and the co-editor of The Impact of Ideas on Legal Development (2012).

This is an enormously rich trousseau of legal histories of marriage and human rights from all continents, by an eminent gathering of historians.

• Introduction: Making Marriage 'Modern', Julia Moses (University of Sheffield, UK)Part I: Marriage and Forms of the Family1. From Liberalism to Human Dignity: The Transformation of Marriage and Family Rights in Brazil, 1822-2013, Sueann Caulfield (University of Michigan, USA)2. From Toleration to Prosecution: Concubinage and the Law in Modern China, Lisa Tran (California State University at Fullerton, USA)3. The Birth of Mistresses and Bastards: A History of Marriage in Siam (Thailand), Tamara Loos (Cornell University, USA)4. Royal Marriage in Europe: An Inherently Conservative System, Helen Watanabe-O'Kelly (University of Oxford, UK)Part II: Marriage, Religion and the State5. 'Til death do you part': Catholicism, Marriage and Culture War in Austria(-Hungary), Ulrike Harmat (Austrian Academy of Sciences, Austria)6. Modernizing Marriage in Egypt, Kenneth M. Cuno (University of Illinois, USA)7. 'A Babel of Law': Hindu Marriage, Global Spaces and Intimate Subjects in Late Nineteenth-Century India, Leigh Denault (University of Cambridge, UK)8. English Exports: Invoking the Common Law of Marriage across the Empire in the Nineteenth Century, Rebecca Probert (University of Warwick, UK)Part III: Marriage, Kinship and Community9. Finding the Ordinary in the Extraordinary: Marriage Norms and Bigamy in Canada, Mélanie Méthot (University of Alberta, Augustana Campus, Canada)10. Equality before the Law? The Intermarriage Debate in Post-Nazi Germany, Julia Woesthoff (DePaul University, USA)11. Customary and Civil Marriage Law and the Question of Gender Equality in Twentieth and Twenty-First-Century Gabon and Africa, Rachel Jean-Baptiste (University of California at Davis, USA)Postscript: How History Matters in Same-Sex Marriage Rights, Nancy F. Cott (Harvard University, USA)