''The routine of legal systems frequently escapes our notice, and imperial ventures only compound this challenge. They either ignored indigenous law or subsumed it in the cogs of colonial administration. Heikki Pihlajamäki’s Conquest and the Law in Swedish Livonia, however, does not shrink before these obstacles. Working withafarfromcompletesetofrecordsacrossanumber of linguistic boundaries—German, Latin, and Swedish, to name the main ones—Pihlajamäki explores how Livonia’s colonial courts worked from the medieval period, when the Teutonic Order held sway, through the end of Swedish rule in 1710. He concludes that Sweden’s institutions influenced Livonia, but Sweden’s law did not, giving us a fresh look at this historically interlegal space. Pihlajamäki’s examination of imperial transformation through legal practices also rescues Livonia from the role of imperial plaything. [...] Conquest and the Law in Swedish Livonia is an important study. The larger interpretive enterprise of which it is a part calls on us all to do better by the history of the Baltic world.
W.Douglas Catterall, in H-Net Reviews (2019).

Heikki Pihlajamäki is Professor of Comparative Legal History at the University of Helsinki. He has published extensively on the legal history of Scandinavia, Europe and America. His research covers a broad time-span from the early modern period to the twentieth century.