BOOK: Lyndsay CAMPBELL & Shaunnagh DORSETT (eds.), Legal Histories of Empire. Navigating Legalities (London: Routledge, 2025), 324 p. ISBN 9781032616179, 140 GBP

 

(image source: Routledge)

Abstract:

This collection brings together an international group of scholars in order to provide new insights into the diversity of imperial legalities.

Across empires, legalities were produced not just – or even – through the imperial imposition of laws and legal forms, but through local processes of negotiation and contestation. Far from the metropoles, local actors found ways to creatively navigate and subvert imperial frameworks and laws and to create space in which to shape new legalities, responsive to local circumstance and need. Covering topics as diverse as smuggling in eighteenth century Jersey, the criminalisation of female market women in World War II-era southern Nigeria, and whiteness and race in ‘sexual perversion’ cases in twentieth-century Malaya, the collection elaborates new legal histories of empire. Drawing from Britain, Ireland, Australia, Canada, the USA, India, Sri Lanka, Africa and Malaysia, the collection brings together chapters that examine the stories of the peoples of empires and shows how they constituted, experienced, navigated and subverted the legal complexities of living under empire.

This book will be of interest to scholars and researchers in law and history, but also to those with relevant interests in post-colonial and cultural studies, as well as in criminology and sociology.

Table of contents:

1. Navigating Legalities: Legal Histories of Empires 

Lyndsay Campbell and Shaunnagh Dorsett 

Part 1: Legalities 

2. Gerald of Wales, John Davies, and the Laws of the Irish in an English Colonial Perspective 

Craig Lyons 

3. Constituting a Colonial Crisis: Kielley v. Carson, St. John’s, 1838-43 

Lyndsay Campbell 

4. Recrafting Subjecthood through Exceptional Laws in the Nineteenth-Century British Empire 

Amanda Nettelbeck 

5. Making Empire: Writing the 1833 Ceylon Charter of Justice and Curial Reform in the British Empire 

Shaunnagh Dorsett 

Part 2: Negotiating Legalities 

6. Resisting and Extending Empire: How the Acadian People Shaped British and French Imperial Rule Through the Strategic Use of Law 

Robert Hamilton 

7. Arbitration and Empire: The Anti-Adjudicatory State in Bengal and British America, 1763–1775 

Christian R. Burset 

8. Legally Interconnecting Empires in the Americas: The Circulation of ‘Foreign’ Law Books in Québec and Louisiana from the 17th to the Early 19th Century 

Serge Dauchy 

9. Protestant State, Catholic Subjects: Religion, Law and Caste in Early Colonial Madras 

Aparna Balachandran 

10. Goomany Naik: Fragments of A ‘Non-Traditional’ Legal Biography 

Nishant Gokhale 

Part 3: Subverting Empire: Legalities and Illegalities 

11. Creative Friction, Legal Pluralism and the Eighteenth-Century Smuggling Economy in the Channel Islands 

David Chan Smith 

12. The ‘Price’ of War: The Criminalization and Punishment of Profiteers in Southern Nigeria during World War II 

Yolanda Chinelo Osondu 

13. Anxieties of Whiteness: Evidence, Race, and Emotions in the (Non-)Prosecution of the “Malayan ‘Sexual Perversion’ Cases,” 1938-1940 

Jack Jin Gary Lee 

14. Merchant Seafarers on British Ships: Lascars, Labour, Law and Empire in the Early 20th Century 

Diane Kirkby

On the editors:

Lyndsay Campbell is Professor in the Faculty of Law and Department of History, University of Calgary, Canada.

Read more here.