The Journal of International
Dispute Settlement published the article “Indian Princely States and the
19th-century Transformation of the Law of Nations”.
The role of the roughly 600
Indian princely kingdoms in the transformation of the law of nations into
international law during the 19th century is an overlooked episode of
international legal history. The Indian princely states effected a gradual end
of the Mughal and the Maratha confederacies while appropriating international
legal language. The Privy Council—before and after 1858—sanctified within
common law as the acts of state, both, the seizure of territories from Indian
kings and the ossification of encumbrances attached to the annexed territories.
After the Crown takeover of the East India Company in 1858, the British India
Government carefully rebooted, even mimicked, the native polyandric
relationship of the tribal chiefs, petty states and semi-sovereigns with the
Mughal–Maratha complex using multi-normative legal texts. Put down in the
British stationery as engagements, sunnuds and treaties, these
colonial texts projected an imperially layered nature of the native
sovereignty. I challenge the metropole's claims of a one-way export to the
colonies of the assumed normative surpluses. I argue that the periphery while
responding to a ‘jurisdictional imperialism' upended interational law's
civilisation-giving thesis by exporting law to the metropole.
More info here
No comments:
Post a Comment