Cambridge History Of Rights: Volume 1, The Ancient World

The ancient world existed before the modern conceptual and linguistic apparatus of rights, and any attempts to understand its place in history must be undertaken with care. This volume covers not only Greco-Roman antiquity, but ranges from the ancient Near East to early Confucian China; Deuteronomic Judaism to Ptolemaic Egypt; and rabbinic Judaism to Sasanian law. It describes ancient normative conceptions of personhood and practices of law in a way that respects their historical and linguistic particularity, appreciating the distinctiveness of the cultures under study whilst clarifying their salience for comparative study. Through thirteen expertly researched essays, volume one of The Cambridge History of Rights is a comprehensive and authoritative reference for the history of rights in the global ancient world and highlights societies that the field has long neglected.

Clifford Ando is Robert O. Anderson Distinguished Service Professor in the Departments of Classics and History at the University of Chicago. He is the author, translator, or editor of twenty-one books, including Imperial Ideology and Provincial Loyalty in the Roman Empire (2000), Law, Language, and Empire in the Roman Tradition (2011), and Roman Social Imaginaries (2016).

Mirko Canevaro is Professor of Greek History at the University of Edinburgh. His research has been funded by, among others, the European Research Council, UKRI, and a Philip Leverhulme Prize. He is author or editor of fifteen books, including The Documents in the Attic Orators (2013) and Commentaries of Demosthenes' Against Leptines (2016) and Aristotle's Politics 4 (2014) and 7-8 (2022).

Benjamin Straumann is ERC Professor of History at the University of Zurich and Research Professor of Classics at New York University. He is also Alberico Gentili Senior Fellow at New York University School of Law. The recipient of a European Research Council grant, he is the author of Roman Law in the State of Nature (2015); Crisis and Constitutionalism (2016); and The Just State: Greek and Roman Theories of Justice and Their Legacy in Western Thought (2025).