The purpose of this workshop is to begin conceptualising the history of ‘duties’ and their relationship to ‘rights’. Historians have long treated duties either parenthetically or as afterthoughts in their histories of rights. Although legal scholars are well-aware of the problems of ‘duties’ and ‘duty-bearing’ in law, historians have tended to neglect them. But what would a history of ‘rights’ look like by foregrounding the problem of ‘duties’? How might this history be approached? And is a ‘long’ or ‘deep’ history of duties (the two are not the same) possible and useful?