As English state capacity grew and the crown faced growing financial constraints at home, colonies became tempting targets. This chapter explores the crown’s attempts to unwind the institutions of contractual imperialism and assert unilateral, direct control over colonies. However, when the crown made these attempts, colonial institutions had taken deep root over decades. The chapter explains why the crown was unable to force its vision of government on the colonies autocratically, and instead pivoted to a negotiated model of governance: Regulatory imperialism.

The Middle East, defined here as the twenty-two members of the Arab League plus Iran and Turkey, has a poor record on matters of governance. Even within the fifty-seven-member Organization of Islamic Cooperation, it stands out as weak on rule of law, civil liberties, and government transparency. Another salient characteristic of the Middle East is that its exposure to Islamic law (Sharia) lasted far longer than anywhere else. No Middle Eastern country is governed by Islamic law today; even Iran and Saudi Arabia operate under largely secularized laws. Yet the region’s legal history causes one to expect specific Islamic laws of the past to illuminate its poor political performance today. The legacies transcend contexts explicitly involving religion. Regardless of religious beliefs or attitudes toward religion, every decision maker in the region is constrained by institutions that bear influences of earlier institutions grounded in Islamic law. The contexts that the book’s analysis brings into focus are civic engagement, religious liberty, and economic capability. The illiberal patterns observed in these contexts are sometimes attributed to European colonization alone. In fact, whatever their harms to the region, colonial policies also mitigated institutional inefficiencies rooted in precolonial history.

Islam’s historical institutional complex has delayed a liberal order in the Middle East, not blocked it permanently. The institutions primarily responsible for the region’s historical trajectory are either gone or, under new conditions, they no longer inhibit liberalization. The infrastructure for an effective civil society is in place. Apart from private associations, it includes perpetual enterprises. And no absolute barrier exists to reinterpreting illiberal readings of Islam. By and large, the institutions that sustain the region’s repressive regimes are mutually supporting. For example, religious illiberalism facilitates associational repression, and vice versa. In any one context, the interlinkages among various institutions may work against liberalization, because change depends on appropriate movements in complementary institutions. The half-full part of this glass is that altering a single institution can destabilize others, possibly unleashing a cascade of mutually reinforcing reforms. Yet there is probably no quick fix to the prevailing illiberalism. Many patterns must change for the Middle East to reach advanced standards of liberty. Although specific changes can stimulate one another, each involves adjustments to interpersonal norms, organizational rules, and state laws. Some would upset longstanding status rankings and hierarchies. Learning civic skills requires communal practice. Vested interests are already organized.

Chapter 9 proposes a normative and historical evaluation of the book's findings. It first considers how lawyers compare to other ghostwriters of institutional change, suggesting that what distinguishes lawyers is their capacity to wield a mediatory, boundary-blurring agency to seize opportunities for change that may be lost upon actors shackled to single institutional settings. It then addresses the ethics of lawyers’ ghostwriting, submitting that while concealed actions pushing the bounds of the acceptable are often necessary to jump-start institutional change, Euro-lawyering became more normatively problematic as it corporatized and stratified access to transnational justice. Finally, the chapter concludes by taking stock in light of the contemporary challenges plaguing the rule of law in Europe. As a wave of illiberalism and constitutional breakdowns has swept some EU member states, Euro-lawyers have gained a new raison d’être in the struggle to reclaim the elusive liberal promise of the judicial construction of Europe.

Chapter 1 illuminates the concealed politics behind the growing reliance on law and courts to shape public policy and resolve political struggles. Focusing on what is often depicted as a cradle of judicial activism and the "judicialization of politics" – the European Union (EU) – the chapter develops a revisionist theory of lawyers, courts, and political development that animates this book. Beneath the radar, the EU's political development through law is an exemplary story of how lawyers mobilize courts to catalyze institutional change – alongside the limits, mutations, and consequences accompanying these efforts. It is a story that places in stark relief how political orders forged through networks of courts emerge, why judges would resist these institutional changes when they would augment their own power, and the conditions whereby lawyers can overcome bureaucratic and political resistances to judicialization. The chapter introduces the concept of ghostwriting to describe lawyers who act as agents of change while cloaked behind the sheepskin of rights-conscious litigants and activist judges. It then outlines a research design to exhume how the politics of lawyers shaped the tortuous development of the world’s sole supranational polity, concluding with a roadmap for the rest of the book.

This chapter demonstrates how old the idea that families do not belong to political orders is in Western thinking. This idea has dominated anthropology, political science and sociology. Despite its popularity, the idea of an opposition between kinship and states is built on problematic notions about the state and kinship and it ignores empirical evidence. The ambition to describe kinship-based groups as obstacles to political development began with early modern thinkers like Jean Bodin and Thomas Hobbes but it was reinforced in the nineteenth century by sociologists as well as anthropologists. Understanding how the expulsion of kinship from our ideas of political order was essentially a political project, not the result of academic analysis, helps us to view European and Middle Eastern history with fresh eyes.