Sous tutelle. Biens sans maître et successions vacantes dans une perspective comparative, XIIIe-XXe siècles / Under Guardianship. Properties without Owner and Vacant Successions in a Comparative Perspective, 13th-20th Centuries

Through the analysis of a variety of cases, from premodern Europe and its colonial Worlds, to North Africa and the Middle East, all the way to East Asia, the articles presented in this issue all deal with the different ways through which these societies solved the problem of the (temporary or permanent) inability of human beings to take care of resources and meet the obligations inherent in ownership. The institutions and procedures put in place in order to ensure that no patrimony should remain without an owner, so as to guarantee the performance of reciprocal obligations and safeguard social and economic relations, show how things and their right to be properly used and preserved are an active actor, hence the proliferation of institutions and bodies that try to protect them from the risk of social discontinuity resulting from the precarious and ephemeral nature of the human being.