What role did the Roman legal concept of res nullius (things without owners), or the related concept of terra nullius (land without owners), play in the context of early modern European expansion? Scholars have provided widely different answers to this question. Some historians have argued that European claims based on terra nullius became a routine part of early modern interimperial politics, particularly as a response by the English and French crowns to expansive Iberian claims supported by papal donations. Others have countered that allusions to terra nullius marked a temporary phase of imperial discourse and that claimants relied more often on other rationales for empire, rarely mentioning res nullius or terra nullius and often explicitly recognizing the ownership rights, and even the sovereignty, of local polities and indigenous peoples.

The printing press was recognized by early modern commentators, just as it has been by historians, as an important invention that had profound effects on the arts and sciences. Legal historians have not missed the potentially transformative effects of printing—not only might lawyers found heterodox arguments upon the precise words of printed texts, rather than relying upon the “common learning,” but the absence of texts from the “common learning” in the printed canon meant legal historians themselves labored for many years under a misapprehension as to the nature of medieval English law. However, little work has been undertaken on the precise impact of printing upon the English legal profession, particularly in the shorter term. Common lawyers, particularly in the sixteenth century, were a group who increasingly relied upon, and cited, textual material as the foundation of their arguments on all points of law. Over the course of the sixteenth century, lawyers came increasingly to rely upon prior cases, and particularly prior judged cases, as the basis of legal arguments and of the correctness of those arguments. Advocates and judges were all faced with a large, and still growing, body of manuscript material, and a sizeable collection of printed works. Attitudes towards printed material is an important topic for historians of early modern law for suggesting which sources of legal ideas were given more prominence in the period.

Confined alone in a cell in New York's Fort Lafayette in the heat of the summer of 1865, former Confederate naval secretary Stephen R. Mallory had little to do but reflect on the fate of the defeated Confederacy. Convinced that his life might be forfeit if the United States government made good on its threat to try him for treason, Mallory composed a lengthy letter to President Andrew Johnson petitioning for a pardon and seeking to explain his views on the demise of the Confederacy and the fate of the states' right to secede from the Union. While Mallory stressed his opposition to disunion in 1861, on the grounds of its inexpediency, he admitted that he had placed loyalty to his state above his duty as a citizen of the United States. He had “regarded the commands of my state as decisive of my path of duty; and I followed where she led.” Nonetheless, Mallory went on to disclaim his belief in the principle of secession in very striking terms, describing the death of secession in the crucible of the Civil War as the result of a trial by battle. Mallory never specifically denied secession's constitutionality; instead, he told Johnson that because he “recognize[ed] the death [of the Confederacy] as the will of Almighty God, I regard and accept His dispensation as decisive of the questions of slavery and secession.”

On May 17, 1853, a court sentenced Francis Prout of East Stonehouse, Devon, to six months' hard labor for receiving £1 15s. in stolen money. Prout's “lodger,” a Mary Ann Foss, had stood charged with the theft at the local quarter sessions, but during her trial she denounced Prout as a brothel keeper who profited from crimes committed in his house. With no real warning, Prout found himself tried and convicted. An even more alarming surprise followed a few days later, when the local authorities decided to pursue Prout's property. They invoked the ancient practice by which felons forfeited their possessions, claiming not just Prout's moveable goods, as was common, but also his ninety-nine-year leases on two local pubs and the profits from his freehold on a pub and houses in Plymouth. The latter constituted an unusual decision, in part because the inquisition necessary to seize the property would cost about £150, and in this case no interested party stepped forward to pay the fees. But as the chairman of the quarter sessions argued, Prout's property was “chiefly acquired by the wages of prostitution.” Underneath his talk of “fallen women” and “unfortunate creatures” lay a very modern concern with the illicit proceeds of criminal activity. In such a case, the chairman opined, the property in question should be forfeit.

The dependence of colonization on police was a core feature both of settler colonies and of colonial dependencies, from the middle of the nineteenth century to the post–World War I decline of the British Empire. During this long century the functions and structures of colonial police were many and varied. We now know a good deal of their history and of their contribution to Empire. Much remains to be told of the slow processes of policing reform and especially of the politics of key events that shaped—and impeded—emerging models of accountability. In that process we see the influence of key episodes in which singular events are escalated into major political conflicts, of national and international dimension. In this article we examine one such event, the death in 1933 of an Aboriginal woman in the Gulf Country of Australia's Northern Territory, and the subsequent prosecution of a policeman over her death. Such a rare event as prosecution of police for violence against indigenous people demands contextual explanation as well as estimation of the limits on legal accountability for such actions.

World War I was a pivotal event for U.S. political and economic development, particularly in the realm of public finance. For it was during the war that the federal government ended its traditional reliance on regressive import duties and excise taxes as principal sources of revenue and began a modern era of fiscal governance, one based primarily on the direct and progressive taxation of personal and corporate income. The wartime tax regime, as the historian David M. Kennedy has observed, “occasioned a fiscal revolution in the United States.”

It was a time of greenbacks, goldbugs, and grangers; milquetoast mugwumps; single-taxers, socialists, standpatters, and the Sugar Trust. Calls for more taxes filled the air. Populist Mary Lease urged Americans to “raise less corn and more hell,” and even Andrew Carnegie piously endorsed an estate tax “by which the State marks its condemnation of the selfish millionaire's unworthy life.” All that hell-raising pushed an income tax through Congress in 1894, but a year later, the Supreme Court granted relief to Charles Pollock, a ten-share stockholder in the Farmers' Loan and Trust Company, leaving Justice Henry Brown to moan in dissent that “the decision involve[d] nothing less than the surrender of the taxing power to the moneyed class.” The Populist Party demanded that “[t]he power of government—in other words, of the people—should be expanded … to the end that oppression, injustice, and poverty shall eventually cease in the land.” By the summer of 1914, oppression, injustice, and poverty were still around, but the Constitution had a Sixteenth Amendment, and the power to collect corporate excise and personal income taxes rested in the hands of the Treasury Department. But still, with all that hell-raising, I wouldn't wanted to work there.

Ajay Mehrotra has afforded us an opportunity to better appreciate and understand the development of state capacity in modern U.S. history. With detailed research findings and a well-organized narrative, he focuses on the elaboration of revenue generation and management systems appropriate and adequate to the growing responsibilities and commitments of the national government in the early twentieth century. It is the burden of Mehrotra's argument that “bureaucratic professionals” were as important a part of the “fiscal revolution” in modern U.S. politics as were changing governmental structures and evolving events and contingencies. Using World War I as his case study, Mehrotra seeks to refine and extend the narrative of organizational change and the rise of the modern state in the United States.

One of the challenges in writing about the history of American law and political economy is determining the proper amount of historical context necessary to make sense of past institutional and organizational change. Where to begin and end a historical narrative and how much to include about the broader social, cultural, political, and economic conditions of a particular place and time are, of course, questions that accompany any attempt to reconstruct the past. How one addresses these issues invariably shapes the motives and intentions that can be ascribed to historical figures. In their eloquent and thoughtful comments, Christopher Capozzola and Michael Bernstein have urged me to think more carefully about these issues, about where my story begins and ends, about the broader social, political, and material circumstances that animated World War I state-building, and about the seemingly apolitical ideas and actions of the Treasury lawyers who are the center of “Lawyers, Guns, and Public Moneys.”