(Source: IIAS)
We learned of a public lecture by Professor
Agmon at Leiden University’s International Institute for Asian Studies.
The Lecture
French missionaries in India studied local law,
shared this work with legal scholars in the metropole, and fundamentally shaped
eighteenth-century Orientalist discourses about Asian and global law.
Central to comparative legal scholarship of
this period was a schematic account of Indian law written in 1714 by the
Jesuit Jean-Venant Bouchet, a work that informed Montesquieu and Voltaire’s
writings on comparative legal regimes. But how was Father Bouchet’s description
of Indian law shaped by his lived experiences as a participant in legal
disputes in India?
This paper considers this question through an
analysis of Bouchet’s description of Indian law in light of his arrest in the
town of Thakkolam in the Carnatic region, and resulting experiences in
South Indian legal arenas. In doing so, this paper demonstrates how Catholic
orientalist scholarship on law emerged from the daily practice of Jesuit
conversion in the mission field.
Danna Agmon is a historian of French empire, specializing
in the history of French India in the eighteenth century. Her book,
titled A Colonial Affair: Commerce, Conversion, and Scandal in French
India, is both a global history and a local history. A Colonial
Affair, published in September 2017 by Cornell University Press, offers a
comprehensive analysis of the competing French projects of trade and religion
in the Indian Ocean at the turn of the eighteenth century. At the same time, it
reveals how the life of one man – Nayiniyappa, the most senior Indian employee
in the French colony of Pondicherry – was tragically upended by his enmeshment
in the imperial project.
Organisation
The Leiden Indian Ocean Lectures series is
organised by the Leiden Centre for Indian Ocean
Studies (Leiden
University, KITLV/Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and IIAS).
Registration
Please let us know you are coming via the web
form below.
All information, as well as the registration
link, can be found here
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