Of late, historians have been realising that South Asia and Europe have more in common than the legacy of Orientalism, area studies, and a particular strand in the historiography on "the rise of the  West" would have us believe. In both world regions a plurality of languages, religions, and types of belonging by birth was in premodern times matched by a plurality of legal systems and  practices. Through careful case-by-case descriptions of the  points where law and social diversity intersected, the volume puts the debate on "legal pluralism," waged among anthropologists, jurists and legal historians, into the new perspective of a long term comparison that is bound  to unsettle both  notions of "Europe" and "non-Europe."