By birth or consent: children, law, and the Anglo-American revolution in authority

In recent years, the cross-examination of the legal history of early modern Britain and its colonial possessions has generated an abundance of scholarship.Previous generations' laments about the bifurcation of the study of legal systems and social practices, or concerns about the wearisome tasks involved in making sense of the legal records, have withered away.Indeed, the possibilities of locating legal theories and practices within cultural as well as institutional contexts, of isolating moments of intersection and points of diversion, have excited the interest of social historians outside the legal academy (on both sides of the Atlantic), and in so doing transformed one of the most stagnant fields of historical enquiry into one of the most conceptually adventurous.