We learned of an online symposium on legal histories of empire in March.
Join us for the second of several symposia
planned for 2020 and 2021 for Legal Histories of Empire.
Our speakers:
Lisa Ford: ‘The King’s Colonial Peace: Variable
subjecthood and the transformation of empire’
This paper is drawn from my forthcoming book,
The King’s Peace: Empire and Order in the British Empire. The book uses
colonial peacekeeping as a lens through which to examine the shifting
parameters of crown prerogative in Empire in the Age of Revolutions. This paper
will argue that the legal vulnerability of (and often threats to order posed
by) a diverse array of subjects – formerly French Catholics in Quebec, Caribbean
slaves and NSW convicts – both prompted and justified the unravelling of the
very idea of the freeborn Englishman that had been mobilised by protestant
Britons in pre-revolutionary America.
Lisa Ford is Professor of History at the
University of New South Wales, Australia. Her major publications include
Settler Sovereignty: Jurisdiction and Indigenous People in America and
Australia, 1788-1836 (2010) which won the Littleton-Griswold Prize (American
Historical Association); the Thomas J. Wilson Prize (Harvard University Press);
and the Premiers History Award (NSW). She is also co-author of Rage for Order:
The British Empire and the Origins of International Law, 1800-1850 (co-authored
with Lauren Benton, 2016) and author of The King’s Peace, which will be
published by Harvard later this year. Ford is currently leading a collaborative
project funded by the Australian Research Council exploring the role of
commissions of inquiry sent throughout the British Empire in the 1820s on which
subject she hopes to lead author a book manuscript this year. She also holds a
four-year ARC Future Fellowship, during which she will explore the changing use
of martial law in the British Empire from the late eighteenth century until
1865.
Jessica Hinchy: ‘Child Removal and the Colonial Governance of
the Family: Hijra and “Criminal Tribe” Households in North India, c. 1865-1900’
Historians have primarily examined colonial
child removal projects in settler colonial contexts. Yet from 1865, the
colonial government in north India forcibly removed children from criminalised
communities. Child separation began in the households of gender non-conforming
people labelled ‘eunuchs,’ particularly Hijras, and eventually extended to
socially marginalised people designated as ‘criminal tribes,’ especially
Sansiyas. First, what does a comparison of these child removal schemes tell us
about the colonial governance of the family? Patrilineal, conjugal and
reproductive household models marginalised Hijras and Sansiyas in differing
ways, while the category of ‘child’ was contingently defined. Child separation
was attempted to varying ends, including both elimination and assimilation. Yet
often, the colonial state could not sustain such intensified forms of intimate
governance in the face of resistance from households. Nor could officials
simply determine removed children’s futures. Second, what does child removal
suggest about the making of colonial law? When children were initially removed from
Hijra and Sansiya households, officials admitted that ‘the law may have been
somewhat strained,’ since existing laws did not provide police or magistrates
with legal powers to separate these children. The Sansiya child removal
project, for instance, prompted debates about colonial legal exceptions and the
‘legality’ of the colonial state’s practices among colonial officials and
Indian and European non-officials.
Jessica Hinchy is an Assistant Professor of
History at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. She researches the
history of gender, sexuality, households and family in colonial north India. In
2019, Cambridge University Press published her first monograph, Governing
Gender and Sexuality in Colonial India: The Hijra, c. 1850-1900. Her research
has also appeared in Modern Asian Studies, Gender & History and Asian
Studies Review, among other journals.
The event will take place by zoom on Friday 5
March (or Thursday 4 March, depending on your timezone – see below). Please
register here (via Eventbrite) to attend.
Timezones:
Sydney @ 12.30 pm on 5 March
Singapore @ 9.30 am on 5 March
Auckland @ 2.30 pm on 5 March
New Delhi @ 7.00 am on 5 March
London/Dublin @ 1.30 am on 5 March
Nairobi @ 4.30 am on 5 March
Vancouver @ 5.30 pm on 4 March
New Haven/Toronto @ 8.30 pm on 4 March
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