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Making Promises

Making Promises

Oaths, Treaties, and Covenants in Multi-jurisdictional and Multi-religious Societies

by Pamela Klassen, Benjamin L. Berger and Monique Scheer

Published by: University of Toronto Press

Imprint: University of Toronto Press

352 Pages, 152.00 × 229.00 × 25.00 mm, 33 colour illustratons, 15 b&w illustrations

Paperback
9781487542078
Published: November 2025

£22.99

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Hardcover
9781487542061
Published: November 2025

£59.00

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Description
Contents
Authors

How should we understand promises as public, private, or political commitments? What are the conditions for promise-making in religiously diverse societies with competing jurisdictions and sovereignties? Making Promises addresses how promises are made meaningful not only through law, but also through appeals to transcendent powers across diverse traditions.
Each contribution in this volume takes a closer look at specific kinds of promises: oaths, treaties, and covenants. The chapters reveal much about the nature of promises in multi-religious and multi-jurisdictional societies, and with contributions from scholars of religious studies, Indigenous studies, law, history, politics, and anthropology, this volume represents a comparative conversation on the making of promises. It pays close attention to Indigenous histories, visions, and conceptions of justice; comparative law within and across settler colonial states; interactions among religions and secularisms; and the ongoing importance of material culture, ritual, and emotion for these practices.
At a time of human-caused environmental devastation and political upheaval, when making promises for the future seems both urgent and futile, this volume shows that promises have long been made and unmade, kept and broken, in ways that successive generations need to acknowledge and take up anew.

Promising Practices: A Preface
Pamela E. Klassen, Monique Scheer, and Benjamin L. Berger

Introduction: Fragmented Promises, Pentimento & the Salvage Paradigm
Jeffery Hewitt

Part I: Promises in Place: A Great Lakes Pentimento
Pamela E. Klassen

1. Remembering, Forgetting and the Telling of Stories: Land and Commemoration in the
    Aftermath of the American Revolution
    Elizabeth Elbourne

2. "The Culture of the Soil": Agriculture, Improvement, and Settler Colonial Landscapes of
Nineteenth-Century Manitoulin Island
Kate Stoehr

3. Between Gratitude and Guilt: The Promise of a Better Life in a Settler Colony for Racialized Refugees
Sujith Xavier

Part II: The Weight of the Promise: Material–Immaterial Practices
Monique Scheer

4. Making Promises to the Shogun: Spinoza on the Dutch United East Indian Company in Japan
Pooyan Tamimi Arab

5. Longing and Belonging in France and Algeria: The Promise of Amel’s Chedda
Jennifer Selby

6. Quid pro Quo? Egyptian Papyri Distributions and the Bureaucracy of a Promise
Gregory Fewster

7. Covenant, Torah, and the Failed Promise of Jewish Museums
Yaniv Feller

Part III: The Oath, the Law, and the "Sense of Religion"
Benjamin L. Berger

8. "However Honestly Meant": Chinese Australians and Truth-Telling in Colonial Victorian
      Courts
      Catherine Evans

9. An Oath on the Big Book: Oaths and Examinations in American Codes of Procedure
Kellen Funk
10. Ceremonial Promises: Oath, Treaties, and the Transformation of Christian Privilege in Canada
Pamela E. Klassen and Isabel Klassen-Marshall

Conclusion: Promises That Make Us Who We Are
Jeremy Webber

Pamela E. Klassen is a professor of the study of religion at the University of Toronto, and the author of The Story of Radio Mind: A Missionary’s Journey on Indigenous Land (University of Chicago Press, 2018).

Monique Scheer is a professor of historical and cultural anthropology at the University of Tübingen, and the author of Enthusiasm: Emotional Practices of Conviction in Modern Germany (Oxford University Press, 2020).