Abstract：Since the 1970s, the Western scholars, who were influenced by the rise of new social history,have sought to understand the 18th-century English society from a legal perspective, thereby achieving a paradigmatic shift in historical research by considering law a dynamic socio-cultural phenomenon. They discovered that the English law in the 18th-century was undergoing changes in both form and content:the local governmental structures were adjusted due to social transformations, the criminal justice system became rigorous increasingly, the number of civil lawsuits decreased significantly, and the parliamentary legislation grew at an unprecedented rate. Those changes fundamentally made the nature of the state and law more different than before, manifesting a tendency toward administrative centralisation while simultaneously challenging and reshaping traditional forms of public participation in legal operations. The Western scholarship demonstrates a distinct academic trend of integrating legal history with social history, emphasising the embeddedness of law in daily life and its role in shaping state authority and social order. However, the relationship between state and society in 18th-century England was not, as some Western scholars suggest, a straightforward transition from a‘negotiated’to a‘repressive’model, but rather a complex and ongoing process of reconstruction. The enhancement of state administrative capacity in 18 th-century England did not mean that the state abandoned the shaping of its legitimacy and social recognition. Although the ordinary people were constrained by new institutional logics, they could still participate in governance through local administration, jury systems, petitioning activities, and other means, thereby maintaining the interaction between state authority and public participation within legal processes.
Published on World History, Issue 6, 2025.
