BOOK REVIEW: Ron HARRIS on An empire of laws: legal pluralism in British colonial policy by Christian R. Burset (Comparative Legal History, XIII (2025), nr. 1, June, pp. 146-149)

(Image source: Taylor&Francis)

Christian Burset’s first book, An Empire of Laws, is brilliant. It should be of particular interest to the readers of this journal, as it makes an important addition to the theoretical toolkit available to comparative legal historians. The book explores Britain’s legal policy at a crucial time in the history of the British Empire. During and following the Seven Years’ War (1756–63), Britain expanded its Empire. Hitherto, most of the British colonies were settled by British farmers and plantation and slave owners, which brought about an opportunity for the English common law to be received in the colonies. However, these new territories were formerly ruled by the Spanish, French, or Mughal Empires. Accordingly, the question arose as to whether the common law should be extended to these newly acquired colonies, notwithstanding that they were not settled by English immigrants in large numbers, or at all. Should the new colonial rulers maintain the pre-existing legal systems of these colonies? Alternatively, should a mixture of the differing legal systems be implemented? Thirteen years later, Britain lost many of its former settler colonies in the American War of Independence. At this juncture, much of the Empire was not comprised of British settlers, and imperial legal policy became a major issue. Burset makes a significant scholarly contribution by explaining the background and the issues at stake in this formative period, 1760-1780.

To read the full review, please click here. Online access is free for members of the European Society for Comparative Legal History. 

DOI: 10.1080/2049677X.2025.2500209

LECTURE SERIES: Commissions of Inquiry and the Remaking of British Colonial Slavery, 1822 – 1831 (Law and History Workshop, 1 March 2022, ONLINE)

 

(Image source: Stanford Center for Law and History)

We learned that the next seminar of the Law and History Workshop organized by the Stanford Center for Law and History will be held on Tuesday, March 1, from 12:45-2:00PM (Pacific) in Room 320D, Stanford Law School, and via Zoom. 

Lisa Ford and Naomi Parkinson, University of New South Wales History, will share the paper: "Commissions of Inquiry and the Remaking of British Colonial Slavery, 1822 – 1831." Professor Ford and Dr Parkinson will be presenting the paper via Zoom but participants will be able to attend either in-person or online. 

Please RSVP by Monday, February 21. To RSVP, click here. Those who confirm their attendance will receive a separate email containing the paper and link to the event after the RSVP deadline.

For those who attend in-person lunch will be provided at 12:25PM, 20 minutes before the workshop at a table in Crocker Garden to the left of Room 190 entry doors. We also ask all those who attend in-person to comply with current Stanford event guidelines which can be found here.

ABSTRACT

In the early 1820s, the Liverpool Government launched an ambitious program to reform the condition of slaves across its Empire. Driven by the ‘Saints’ in Parliament, the British Colonial Office attempted to introduce uniform rights and protections for slaves in British colonies. The Trinidad Ordinance, first introduced in 1824 and eventually imposed on Britain’s crown colonies, was one medium for reform. Commissions of Inquiry, dispatched to almost every British colony from 1818-1830 and tasked with reporting back on the state of slavery, were another.

This paper examines the role Commissions of Inquiry played as instigators of and witnesses to this wider project of imperial reform. It argues that the commissioners had a marginal role in setting the terms of slavery’s amelioration, as their recommendations for law reform almost always arrived too late to shape imperial policy. However, the commissions had more impact on the ground. Focusing on the Cape, we show how the Commissioners of Eastern Inquiry inserted themselves into everyday conflicts between slaves, masters and officials, taking on the role of de facto protectors. Their investigation of slave complaints was unusual, but showcases an important function of commissions of inquiry, nevertheless. They embodied the Crown in empire, creating new pathways of complaint and surveillance that bound peripheries and center in the aftermath of the Napoleonic War.

More information can be found here.

BOOK: Lisa FORD, The King's Peace. Law and Order in the British Empire (Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard UP, 2021), 336 p. ISBN 9780674249073

(image source: HUP)

On the book:

How the imposition of Crown rule across the British Empire during the Age of Revolution corroded the rights of British subjects and laid the foundations of the modern police state. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the British Empire responded to numerous crises in its colonies, from North America to Jamaica, Bengal to New South Wales. This was the Age of Revolution, and the Crown, through colonial governors, tested an array of coercive peacekeeping methods in a desperate effort to maintain control. In the process these leaders transformed what it meant to be a British subject. In the decades after the American Revolution, colonial legal regimes were transformed as the king’s representatives ruled new colonies with an increasingly heavy hand. These new autocratic regimes blurred the lines between the rule of law and the rule of the sword. Safeguards of liberty and justice, developed in the wake of the Glorious Revolution, were eroded while exacting obedience and imposing order became the focus of colonial governance. In the process, many constitutional principles of empire were subordinated to a single, overarching rule: where necessary, colonial law could diverge from metropolitan law. Within decades of the American Revolution, Lisa Ford shows, the rights claimed by American rebels became unthinkable in the British Empire. Some colonial subjects fought back but, in the empire, the real winner of the American Revolution was the king. In tracing the dramatic growth of colonial executive power and the increasing deployment of arbitrary policing and military violence to maintain order, The King’s Peace provides important lessons on the relationship between peacekeeping, sovereignty, and political subjectivity—lessons that illuminate contemporary debates over the imbalance between liberty and security.

On the author:

 Lisa Ford is the author of the prizewinning Settler Sovereignty: Jurisdiction and Indigenous People in America and Australia, 1788–1836 and coauthor of Rage for Order: The British Empire and the Origins of International Law, 1800–1850. She is Professor of History at the University of New South Wales.

(source: Harvard UP)

 

BOOK: Deana HEATH, Colonial Terror. Torture and State Violence in Colonial India (Oxford: University Press, 2021). ISBN: 9780192893932, pp. 240, £ 80.00

 

(Source: OUP )

ABOUT THE BOOK

Focusing on India between the early nineteenth century and the First World War, Colonial Terror explores the centrality of the torture of Indian bodies to the law-preserving violence of colonial rule and some of the ways in which extraordinary violence was embedded in the ordinary operation of colonial states. Although enacted largely by Indians on Indian bodies, particularly by subaltern members of the police, the book argues that torture was facilitated, systematized, and ultimately sanctioned by first the East India Company and then the Raj because it benefitted the colonial regime, since rendering the police a source of terror played a key role in the construction and maintenance of state sovereignty. Drawing upon the work of both Giorgio Agamben and Michel Foucault, Colonial Terror contends, furthermore, that it is only possible to understand the terrorizing nature of the colonial police in India by viewing colonial India as a 'regime of exception' in which two different forms of exceptionality were in operation - one wrought through the exclusion of particular groups or segments of the Indian population from the law and the other by petty sovereigns in their enactment of illegal violence in the operation of the law. It was in such fertile ground, in which colonial subjects were both included within the domain of colonial law while also being abandoned by it, that torture was able to flourish. in which two different forms of exceptionality were in operation - one wrought through the exclusion of particular groups or segments of the Indian population from the law and the other by petty sovereigns in their enactment of illegal violence in the operation of the law. It was in such fertile ground, in which colonial subjects were both included within the domain of colonial law while also being abandoned by it, that torture was able to flourish. in which two different forms of exceptionality were in operation - one wrought through the exclusion of particular groups or segments of the Indian population from the law and the other by petty sovereigns in their enactment of illegal violence in the operation of the law. It was in such fertile ground, in which colonial subjects were both included within the domain of colonial law while also being abandoned by it, that torture was able to flourish.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Deana Heath is Reader in Indian and Colonial History at the University of Liverpool. She received her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley and has since held academic posts in four countries: the United States, Ireland, Canada, and the United Kingdom. she has been the beneficiary of grants from numerous national and international funding bodies, including the Independent Social Research Foundation, The Indian Council for Cultural Relations, The Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences, The American Institute of Indian Studies, and the Fulbright Scholar programs. She is currently Reader in Indian and Colonial History at the University of Liverpool.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction: Torture, Empire, and the Exception

1: Violence, the Exception and Bare Life

2: The Facilitators I: Policing

3: The Facilitators II: Law and 'Justice'

4: The Perpetrators

Conclusion: Torture in a State of Exception

More information with the publisher.

BOOK: Michael LOBBAN & Ian WILLIAMS (eds.), Networks and Connections in Legal History (Cambridge: University Press, 2020). ISBN: 1108490883, £ 85.00

(Source: CUP)

ABOUT THE BOOK

Network and Connections in Legal History examines networks of lawyers, legislators and litigators, and how they shaped legal development in Britain and the world. It explores how particular networks of lawyers - from Scotland to East Florida and India - shaped the culture of the forums in which they operated, and how personal connections could be crucial in pressuring the legislature to institute reform - as with twentieth century feminist campaigns. It explores the transmission of legal ideas; what happened to those ideas was not predetermined, but when new connections were made, they could assume a new life. In some cases, new thinkers made intellectual connections not previously conceived, in others it was the new purposes to which ideas and practices were applied which made them adapt. This book shows how networks and connections between people and places have shaped the way that legal ideas and practices are transmitted across time and space.

ABOUT THE EDITORS

Michael Lobban is Professor of Legal History at the London School of Economics and Political Science, England. He is the author of The Common Law and English Jurisprudence, 1760-1850 (1991) and A History of the Philosophy of Law in the Common Law World, 1600-1900 (2007), as well as one of the authors of volumes XI-XIII of The Oxford History of the Laws of England. 

Ian Williams is Associate Professor at the University College London Faculty of Laws, England. His research interests are principally in legal history, particularly early-modern English legal history. He is co-editor of Landmark Cases in Criminal Law.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. Introduction - Michael Lobban and Ian Williams

2. Networks and Influences: Contextualising Personnel and Procedures in the Court of Chivalry - Anthony Musson 

3. Men of law and legal networks in Aberdeen, principally in 1600-1650 - Adelyn Wilson 

4. Calling Time at the Bar: First women barristers and their networks and connections - Judith Bourne

5. The Thistle, the Rose, and the Palm: Scottish and English Judges in British East Florida - M. C. Mirow; 

6. 'The Bengal Boiler': Legal Networks in Colonial Calcutta - Raymond Cocks; 

7. The White Ensign on Land: The Royal Navy and Legal Authority in Early Sierra Leone - Tim Soriano; 

8. A Broker's Advice: Credit Networks and Mortgage Risk in the Eighteenth-century Empire - Julia Rudolph; 

9. Trans-Atlantic connections: The many networks and the enduring legacy of J.P. Benjamin -  Catharine MacMillan; 

10. Interpretatio ex aequo et bono, the emergence of equitable interpretation in European legal scholarship -  Lorenzo Maniscalco; 

11. Shakespeare and the European Ius Commune - R. H. Helmholz; 

12. Law Reporting and Law Making: the Missing Link in Nineteenth-century Tax Law - Chantal Stebbings; 

13. John Taylor Coleridge and English Criminal Law - Philip Handler

More information here

CALL FOR PAPERS : “One Empire, Many Colonies, Similar or Different Histories?”, Australian and New Zealand Law and History Society(Auckland, N-Z, 9-12 December), DEADLINE : 15 July

(Source : ANZLHS)

CALL FOR PAPERS (DEADLINE IS ON 15 JULY)  : 

Abstracts are invited from scholars bringing historical perspective on law who wish to gather at The University of Auckland and AUT University – there to listen to and discuss papers and panels on aspects of law in history. The 2020 theme invites a comparative lens on British imperial and colonial histories. Other papers with an historical perspective on law might include work that positions law in a specific temporal frame; deals with histories of law, lawmaking, and legal ideas; or has a focus on legal institutions and their personnel. Proposals from postgraduate and early career researchers are welcome.

Individual paper proposals for a 20 minute presentation must include an abstract (no more than 300 words) and a biographical statement (no more than 100 words).

Panel proposals by 3 or 4 speakers should include the above, plus a panel title and brief rationale for the panel as a whole (no more than 300 words).

SYMPOSIUM : 9-12 DECEMBER 2020

39^th Annual Conference of the Australian and New Zealand Law and History Society scheduled to be held in Auckland, 9^th-12^th December 2020 will go ahead. 

HOW TO APPLY : 

All abstracts must be submitted to Karen Fairweather: k.fairweather@auckland.ac.nz  

Graduate students are invited to apply for Kercher Scholarships to assist them in attending the conference. Please apply to Katherine Sanders: k.sanders@auckland.ac.nz by 31 August.  

 

MORE INFORMATION : https://anzlhs.org/