Overview

Now available in Open Access thanks to the support of the University of Helsinki. In Conquest and the Law in Swedish Livonia (ca. 1630-1710), Heikki Pihlajamäki offers an exciting account of the law and judiciary in seventeenth-century Livonia. Immediately after Sweden conquered the province in the 1620s, a reorganization of the Livonian judiciary began. Its legal order became largely modelled after Swedish law, which differed in important ways from its Livonian counterpart. While Livonian legal tradition was firmly anchored in the European ius commune, the conquerors’ law was, by nature, not founded in legal learning. The volume convincingly demonstrates how the differences in legal cultures decisively affected the way Livonian judicial and procedural systems were shaped. Based on archival sources, the study presents an important contribution to the comparative legal history of the early modern period.

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9789004331525

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''The routine of legal systems frequently escapes our notice, and imperial ventures only compound this challenge. They either ignored indigenous law or subsumed it in the cogs of colonial administration. Heikki Pihlajamaki's Conquest and the Law in Swedish Livonia, however, does not shrink before these obstacles. Working withafarfromcompletesetofrecordsacrossanumber of linguistic boundaries-German, Latin, and Swedish, to name the main ones-Pihlajamaki explores how Livonia's colonial courts worked from the medieval period, when the Teutonic Order held sway, through the end of Swedish rule in 1710. He concludes that Sweden's institutions influenced Livonia, but Sweden's law did not, giving us a fresh look at this historically interlegal space. Pihlajamaki's examination of imperial transformation through legal practices also rescues Livonia from the role of imperial plaything. [...] Conquest and the Law in Swedish Livonia is an important study. The larger interpretive enterprise of which it is a part calls on us all to do better by the history of the Baltic world. W.Douglas Catterall, in H-Net Reviews (2019).

Author Information

Heikki Pihlajamäki is Professor of Comparative Legal History at the University of Helsinki. He has published extensively on the legal history of Scandinavia, Europe and America. His research covers a broad time-span from the early modern period to the twentieth century.

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