concluding remarks: looking back to the future of legal history legal knowledge, the mutual influences of European and non-European legal cultures, became a major field of inquiry. Global perspectives on legal history are not legal history’s future; they are one of its presents.3 I first came into contact with legal history when I studied law in Greifswald. Greifswald is a remote place by German standards. Poland and Sweden are much closer than Berlin and Frankfurt. It is a place with a high awareness of cross-border connections. Greifswald was part of the Hanseatic League and the contacts in the Baltic region have grown over the centuries. In recent decades, historians and legal historians fromGreifswald have been involved in exchanges with colleagues from universities across Northern Europe and the Baltic States. Reading the records of the Conference in Legal History in the Baltic Sea Area – Rechtshistorikertag im Ostseeraum, which start in the 2000s, I became aware that many ideas on how to deal with cross-border entanglements in legal history had already been formulated. In methodological terms, the history of law in the Baltic region does not differ so very much from a legal history dealing with entanglements on a global scale. What seems interesting is that we are currently, with the ‘global turn’ in legal history, reformulating many of the existing ideas. Legal history has always dealt, inter alia, with inter-regional exchange, and that means entanglements. The inquiry into the characteristics of different legal cultures, and the comparisons between them, has also been a core component of legal-historical research, even before the ‘global turn’. However, I would say that the global turn makes us reflect on these approaches in a new way: when dealing with non-European experiences, concepts and heuristic devices have to be examined and sharpened. A suitable language for the description of fundamentally distinct legal cultures has to be found, and there have to be a new awareness of the pitfalls produced by two centuries of Eurocentric research traditions. 3 See Thomas Duve (ed.), Entanglements in Legal History(Global perspectives on legal history, 1; Frankfurt amMain: Max Planck Institute for European Legal History, 2014) and other books in the same series. 357
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