F.W. Maitland and the Making of the Modern World

F. W. Maitland is sometimes thought of as merely a great legal historian of England. Yet in over three thousand published pages, including his History of English Law (1895) with F. Pollock (of which Maitland wrote all but one chapter), his Collected Papers in three volumes (1911), The Constitutional History of England (1919) and many other works he reveals himself to be one of the profoundest thinkers on how our modern world emerged, on a level with Montesquieu and Tocqueville. Maitland's works on Trusts, on Equity, on Government and on the great tradition of English Common Law explain, in brilliant and simple prose, how the quintessential institutions of successful democracy and capitalism were established in England and then America. Alan Macfarlane, F. B. A., is an Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at Cambridge University and a Life Fellow of King's College. His website is alanmacfarlane.com.