ABSTRACT Empire reveals some of the reasons why the history of legal thought should not be prepared in precisely the same way as the history of political thought. This article, beginning in the Mediterranean before adopting a more transnational scope, identifies analogy, principle, and authority as some of the principal modes of legal reasoning, and then seeks to examine several instances of their application within different imperial and colonial contexts. The British Empire is the most obvious trajectory in what follows. Like many other modern empires, however, it is optimally approached in view of longer term institutional and intellectual developments in Europe. Substantively and procedurally, European law became elaborate over time as dominant communities expanded to interact with more fixed communities. The motivations of those lawyers who elaborated this body of law were various and must be comprehended. While imperialism spurred innovation and change in the kind of objectives that were tasked to legal thinkers, what remained essential to the realisation of those objectives was their ability to enjoy recourse to those very modes of reasoning (analogies, principles, and authorities) that had characterised the development of European legal thought for millennia.

中文翻译：

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法律思想与帝国：从古到今的类比、原则和权威

《抽象帝国》揭示了法律思想史不应以与政治思想史完全相同的方式编写的一些原因。本文从地中海开始，然后采用更具跨国性的范围，将类比、原则和权威确定为法律推理的一些主要模式，然后试图研究它们在不同帝国和殖民背景下的几个应用实例。大英帝国是接下来最明显的轨迹。然而，像许多其他现代帝国一样，考虑到欧洲长期的制度和知识发展，它是最佳方法。随着时间的推移，随着主导社区扩展到与更固定的社区互动，欧洲法律在实质上和程序上变得更加详尽。制定这套法律的律师的动机各不相同，必须加以理解。虽然帝国主义刺激了赋予法律思想家的目标类型的创新和变化，但实现这些目标仍然必不可少的是他们能够诉诸于那些具有特征的推理模式（类比、原则和权威）。几千年来欧洲法律思想的发展。