VACANCIES: 3 PHD students and 1 POSTDOC [Centre for Legal History of India] (Frankfurt: Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory, DEADLINE 3 FEB 2026)

(image source: MPILHLT)

Presentation:

The Centre for Legal History of India (CLHI) in the Department European and Comparative Legal History at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory (mpilhlt) is dedicated to advancing research and academic collaboration in the field of Indian legal history. Its primary objective is to strengthen and professionalize the discipline by providing training, mentorship, and resources to doctoral and postdoctoral researchers, equipping them to produce high-quality scholarship. The Centre seeks to foster a collaborative environment where scholars can engage in critical dialogue about both the current state and future scope of research and pedagogy in this diverse field. Building on a multilateral network connecting institutions and researchers within India and internationally, the Centre showcases the richness and breadth of Indian legal history, identifying areas of common ground while highlighting the diversity of legal traditions and interdisciplinary perspectives. Indian legal history has long been a significant focus in the Department of European and Comparative Legal History, especially in the context of the study of legal transfers within the common law world. Given the central role of the Indian subcontinent in the history of the British Empire and the deep and varied legal traditions therein, the Centre aims to contribute towards developing legal history in India as a distinct and valuable field of study that merits dedicated resources and sustained scholarly attention. The Centre maintains formal collaborations with leading Indian law schools NLSIU Bangalore and NALSAR. It is supported by a Centre Advisory Council and has a dedicated visitors’ programme.

Vacancies here (postdoc), here (PhD candidates).

More information on the centre here.

TALK: Carl LANDAUER, "Twentieth-Century India Reads its Ancient Law of Nations Past" (Berkeley: Institute for South Asia Studies/Center on Contemporary India, 24 SEP 2024) [LIVE VIA FACEBOOK]

 

(image source: Berkeley)

Abstract:

The talk will cover two waves of Indian readings—one in the 1920s and a second after Independence—of India’s ancient inter-polity law, with their focus on Kautilya’s “Arthashastra,” the “Code of Manu,” and the “Shanti Parva” of the “Mahabharata,” and how those readings framed versions of Indian nationalism.

On the speaker:

Carl Landauer is a visiting scholar at the Institute for South Asia Studies. He taught history at Yale, Stanford, and McGill and international legal theory at UC Berkeley Law School. He publishes broadly on the history of international legal thought, with emphasis on the Global South and South Asia.

The event will be livestreamed on Facebook, 5-6:30 PM California Time. 

Read more here.

PODCAST: Naveen KANALU RAMAMURTHY, "Le droit hanéfite dans l’Empire moghol. Institutions, normes et pratiques islamiques en Inde (1650–1700)" (Paris: Collège de France, 14 DEC 2023)

(image source: Collège de France)

 

Abstract:

Tout comme l’Empire ottoman et des khanats d’Asie centrale, l’Empire moghol (1526-1857) – dernière grande puissance impériale ayant dominé le sous-continent indien avant le colonialisme britannique –, était régi par des institutions, normes et pratiques issues du droit hanéfite, une des quatre écoles juridiques de l’islam sunnite. Comment les normes élaborées par le droit savant des juristes hanéfites ont-elles façonné les institutions mogholes ? À partir d’archives multilingues en arabe, en persan et en langues vernaculaires indiennes, nous proposons un petit tour d’horizon des pratiques administratives et juridiques mogholes afin de montrer des relations de pouvoir asymétriques qui existaient entre les agents de l’autorité impériale et les sujets dans les sociétés composées de différentes castes, ethnicités et religions. Il s’agit d’appréhender la normativité juridique entre les normes provenant de la méthode casuistique des juristes et leurs usages par les chancelleries, les administrateurs et les juges à l’œuvre dans l’Empire moghol, l’un des régimes de pouvoir impérial les plus centralisés à l’époque moderne. Nous interrogeons les pratiques quotidiennes de l’application des règles pour saisir le savoir-faire professionnel du système juridique hanéfite qui s’est développé dans la région. Nous faisons ainsi dialoguer la culture juridique de l’Inde moghole avec l’histoire des empires en terre d’Islam.

On the speaker:

Naveen Kanalu Ramamurthay, Maître de conférences, EHESS 

Listen to the podcast here. 

BOOK: Christopher T. FLEMING, Ownership and Inheritance in Sanskrit Jurisprudence (Oxford: OUP, 2021). ISBN 9780198852377, 85.00 USD

 

(Source: OUP)

OUP is publishing a new book on the history of ownership and inheritance in Indian Sanskrit intellectual history.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Ownership and Inheritance in Sanskrit Jurisprudence provides an account of various theories of ownership (svatva) and inheritance (dāya) in Sanskrit jurisprudential literature (Dharmaśāstra). It examines the evolution of different juridical models of inheritance--in which families held property in trusts or in tenancies-in-common--against the backdrop of related developments in the philosophical understanding of ownership in the Sanskrit text-traditions of hermeneutics (Mīmāṃsā) and logic (Nyāya) respectively.

Christopher T. Fleming reconstructs medieval Sanskrit theories of property and traces the emergence of various competing schools of Sanskrit jurisprudence during the early modern period (roughly fifteenth-nineteenth centuries) in Bihar, Bengal, and Varanasi. Fleming attends to the ways in which ideas from these schools of jurisprudence shaped the codification of Anglo-Hindu personal law by administrators of the British East India Company during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. While acknowledging the limitations of colonial conceptions of Dharmaśāstra as positive law, this study argues for far greater continuity between pre-colonial and colonial Sanskrit jurisprudence than accepted previously. It charts the transformation of the Hindu law of inheritance--through precedent and statute--over the late nineteenth, twentieth, and early twenty-first centuries.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Christopher T. Fleming, British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Oxford

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Figures

Introduction

1. Mīmāṃsā and the Mitākṣarā School of Jurisprudence

2. Navya-Nyāya and the Maithila and Gau.da Schools of Jurisprudence

3. The Bhāṭṭa a School of Benares

4. Anglo-Indian Schools of Hindu Law

Market Governance, (Neo)Liberalism, and the Future of Dharmaśāstra in the 21st Century

Glossary of Sanskrit Terms

Bibliography

 

More info here

BOOK: Joseph MCQUADE, A Genealogy of Terrorism: Colonial Law and the Origins of an Idea (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020). ISBN 9781108842150, 75.00 GBP

 

(Source: CUP)

Cambridge is publishing a new book tracing the genealogy of counter-terrorism laws in colonial India.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Using India as a case study, Joseph McQuade demonstrates how the modern concept of terrorism was shaped by colonial emergency laws dating back into the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Beginning with the 'thugs', 'pirates', and 'fanatics' of the nineteenth century, McQuade traces the emerging and novel legal category of 'the terrorist' in early twentieth-century colonial law, ending with an examination of the first international law to target global terrorism in the 1930s. Drawing on a wide range of archival research and a detailed empirical study of evolving emergency laws in British India, he argues that the idea of terrorism emerged as a deliberate strategy by officials seeking to depoliticize the actions of anti-colonial revolutionaries, and that many of the ideas embedded in this colonial legislation continue to shape contemporary understandings of terrorism today.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Joseph McQuade, University of Toronto

Joseph McQuade is the RCL Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto's Asian Institute.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction. The colonial prose of counterterrorism

1. Ethereal assassins: colonial law and 'hereditary crime' in the nineteenth century

2. 'The magical lore of Bengal': surveillance, swadeshi, and propaganda by bomb, 1890s to 1913

3. 'The eye of government is on them': anti-colonialism and emergency during the First World War

4. Indefinite emergency: revolutionary politics and 'terrorism' in interwar India

5. Terrorism as a 'world crime': the British Empire, international law, and the invention of global terrorism

Conclusion. Empire, law, and terrorism in the twenty-first century.

 

More info here

JOURNAL ARTICLE: Prabhakar SINGH, Indian Princely States and the 19th-century Transformation of the Law of Nations (Journal of International Dispute Settlement Vol. 11, Issue 3)

 

(Source: Journal of International Dispute Settlement)

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

BOOK: Javaid HAYAT, Azad Jammu & Kashmir : Polity, Politics and Power-Sharing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). ISBN 9780199408054, 20.00 USD

 

(Source: OUP)

Oxford University Press has published a book on the status and sovereignty of Azad Jammu & Kashmir (AJK) by using a historical and constitutional perspective.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Azad Jammu & Kashmir: Polity, Politics, and Power-Sharing explores the opportunities and pitfalls of establishing democracy and legitimate governance in territories with disputed status, especially where governance systems are fragile and the process of democratization is hindered due to socio-political fault-lines. Apart from probing the decolonisation process in the Indian subcontinent and its subsequent implications, the analyses in this study, adds clarity to our understanding of the status and sovereignty of Azad Jammu & Kashmir (AJK) by using a historical and constitutional perspective; for this purpose, it investigates political and constitutional evolution since 1947. It examines contemporary power-sharing theories and alternatives for the establishment of an autonomous governance structure in order to proceed towards meaningful conflict-management and hence a stable democracy in deeply divided societies, with particular focus on AJK. Javaid Hayat has identified innovative pathways amongst nexuses of sovereignty, autonomy, and democratic governance and has persuasively argued for an alternative model through recognition of internal right to self-determination for building veritable autonomous democratic governance structure in the disputed territory of AJK until an opportunity presents itself for an external right to self-determination as provided to the people of the erstwhile state of J&K, which was promised by the UN and agreed to, by both India and Pakistan.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dr Javaid Hayat is a 'Pracademic' whose career journey has taken him from public to non-profit sector in Asia, Europe, and North America where he has worked with national and international NGOs in various capacities. He is a peace researcher and political scientist. He earned his PhD in Political Science from Freie Universitate, Germany in 2014. He holds two Masters degrees in Peace, Conflict, and Development Studies from Universitate Jaume-I, Spain, and Mass Communication from University of the Punjab, Pakistan. He has graduated in Non-profit Management from Mount Royal University and Career and Academic Advising from University of Calgary, Canada. He received the prestigious George Zundel fellowship from the Berghof Foundation, Germany (20092013). Born in Peshawar and raised in Punjab, Pakistan, Dr Hayat originally hails from Azad Jammu & Kashmir. He has in-depth understanding of the regions history, people, and politics.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Author's Disclaimer

Foreword

Preface

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations

1. Setting the Context

2. Emergence, Status, and Legitimacy of AJK: Does Democracy Need Sovereignty

3. Azad Jammu & Kashmir: Historical, Constitutional, and Political Perspectives

4. Power-Sharing: A Conceptual and Theoretical Reflection

5. Building Autonomous and Democratic Governance in AJK: Recognition of Internal Self-determination

6. Conclusion

Notes

References

Annexures

A. Text of Treaty of Amritsar, 16 March 1846

B. Text of State Subject Definition, 1927

C. Text of Declaration of Independence, 24 October 1947

D. Text of UNCIP Resolution, 1948

E. Text of UNCIP Resolution, 1949

F. Karachi Agreement, 1949 between AJK and Pakistan

G. Text of Ceasefire Agreement, 1949 00

H. Text of Instrument of Accession, 26 October 1947

Index

 

More info here

BOOK: Nandini CHATTERJEE, Negotiating Mughal Law : A Family of Landlords across Three Indian Empires (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020). ISBN 9781108486033, $ 99.99

(Source: CUP)

Oxford University Press is publishing a micro-history analysis to explore law, empire and society in Mughal India.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Based on a completely reconstructed archive of Persian, Hindi and Marathi documents, Nandini Chatterjee provides a unique micro-history of a family of landlords in Malwa, central India, who flourished in the region from at least the sixteenth until the twentieth century. By exploring their daily interactions with imperial elites as well as villagers and marauders, Chatterjee offers a new history from below of the Mughal Empire, far from the glittering courts of the emperors and nobles, but still dramatic and filled with colourful personalities. From this perspective, we see war, violence, betrayal, enterprise, romance and disappointment, but we also see a quest for law, justice, rights and righteousness. A rare story of Islamic law in a predominantly non-Muslim society, this is also an exploration of the peripheral regions of the Maratha empire and a neglected princely state under British colonial rule. This title is also available as Open Access.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Nandini Chatterjee, University of Exeter

Nandini Chatterjee is Associate Professor of History at the University of Exeter. She has published widely on the British and Mughal empires, including her book The Making of Indian Secularism: Empire, Law and Christianity, 1830–1950 (2011).

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

1. Malwa: land of many empires

2. Zamindars: lords of the marches

3. Contractors: engaging the state

4. Transactions: recording deals

5. Disputes: judges and courts

6. Invaders: marathas and the British

7. Identity: professionals or warlords?

Conclusion. Fragments to archives: a methodological manifesto

Appendix. A catalogue of the P Das archive

Glossary.

More info here

BOOK: Madhav KHOSLA, India’s Founding Moment The Constitution of a Most Surprising Democracy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2020). ISBN 9780674980877, €40.50

(Source: Harvard University Press)

Harvard University Press is publishing a book on the history of the Indian constitution.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Britain’s justification for colonial rule in India stressed the impossibility of Indian self-government. And the empire did its best to ensure this was the case, impoverishing Indian subjects and doing little to improve their socioeconomic reality. So when independence came, the cultivation of democratic citizenship was a foremost challenge.

Madhav Khosla explores the means India’s founders used to foster a democratic ethos. They knew the people would need to learn ways of citizenship, but the path to education did not lie in rule by a superior class of men, as the British insisted. Rather, it rested on the creation of a self-sustaining politics. The makers of the Indian Constitution instituted universal suffrage amid poverty, illiteracy, social heterogeneity, and centuries of tradition. They crafted a constitutional system that could respond to the problem of democratization under the most inhospitable conditions. On January 26, 1950, the Indian Constitution—the longest in the world—came into effect.

More than half of the world’s constitutions have been written in the past three decades. Unlike the constitutional revolutions of the late eighteenth century, these contemporary revolutions have occurred in countries characterized by low levels of economic growth and education, where voting populations are deeply divided by race, religion, and ethnicity. And these countries have democratized at once, not gradually. The events and ideas of India’s Founding Moment offer a natural reference point for these nations where democracy and constitutionalism have arrived simultaneously, and they remind us of the promise and challenge of self-rule today.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Madhav Khosla, a political theorist and legal scholar, is the author of The Indian Constitution and coeditor of The Oxford Handbook of the Indian Constitution. He is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Ashoka University, the Ambedkar Visiting Associate Professor of Law at Columbia University, and a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction: The Indian Problem

1. The Grammar of Constitutionalism

2. The Location of Power

3. Identity and Representation

Conclusion: Constitutional Democracy Today

Notes

Acknowledgments

Index

More info here

BOOK: Rahela KHORAKIWALA, From the Colonial to the Contemporary Images, Iconography, Memories, and Performances of Law in India’s High Courts (London: Routledge, 2019). ISBN 9781509930654, £70.00

(Source: Bloomsbury)

Bloomsbury is publishing a book on iconography in India’s High Courts during the British colonial era.

ABOUT THE BOOK

From the Colonial to the Contemporary explores the representation of law, images and justice in the first three colonial high courts of India at Calcutta, Bombay and Madras. It is based upon ethnographic research work and data collected from interviews with judges, lawyers, court staff, press reporters and other persons associated with the courts.

Observing the courts through the in vivo, in trial and practice, the book asks questions at different registers, including the impact of the architecture of the courts, the contestation around the renaming of the high courts, the debate over the use of English versus regional languages, forms of addressing the court, the dress worn by different court actors, rules on photography, video recording, live telecasting of court proceedings, use of CCTV cameras and the alternatives to courtroom sketching, and the ceremony and ritual that exists in daily court proceedings.

The three colonial high courts studied in this book share a recurring historical tension between the Indian and British notions of justice. This tension is apparent in the semiotics of the legal spaces of these courts and is transmitted through oral history as narrated by the judges, lawyers and court staff who are interviewed. The contemporary understandings of these court personnel are therefore seen to have deep historical roots. In this context, the architecture and judicial iconography of the high courts helps to constitute, preserve and reinforce the ambivalent relationship that the court shares with its own contested image.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rahela Khorakiwala is an independent researcher based in Mumbai, India.

More information here

ARTICLE: Pallavi RAGHAVAN, Partition: An International History (The International History Review, Volume XLI, Issue 5)

(Source: Taylor & Francis Online)

Pallavi Raghavan (Ashoka University) has published “Parition: An international history” in the latest issue of The International History Review.

In trying to assemble the structure through which bilateral relations between India and Pakistan could be conducted, policy makers drew heavily from European models of inter-state peace-making evolved in the inter-war decades. The aftermath of the break-up of large multinational empires along ethnic-majoritarian lines posed administrative questions that were, in many ways, also similar to the aftermath of the partition of the subcontinent along religious lines. In this article, I attempt to relate these developments with the signing of the Nehru–Liaquat Pact of 1950, between the governments of India and Pakistan. According to this Pact, both governments would now be accountable to one another for the protection of their minorities in the Bengal province. I argue that this approach to dealing with the question of minority populations after a partition, had been initially developed by the League of Nations, and that emulating these models were part of an attempt by India and Pakistan to borrow from, but also further refine models of European statehood for their own purposes after their partition. This article attempts to evaluate the extent to which these expectations were met in the making of a ‘minorities’ regime’ in South Asia.

The full article can be read here

BOOK: James LEES, Bureaucratic Culture in Early Colonial India District Officials, Armed Forces, and Personal Interest under the East India Company, 1760-1830 (London: Routledge, 2019). ISBN 9781138615496, £115.00

(Source: Routledge)

Routledge is publishing a book on the administration of early colonial India.

ABOUT THE BOOK

This book looks at how the fledgling British East India Company state of the 1760s developed into the mature Anglo-Indian empire of the 19th century. It investigates the bureaucratic culture of early Company administrators, primarily at the district level, and the influence of that culture on the nature and scope of colonial government in India. Drawing on a host of archival material and secondary sources, James Lees details the power relationship between local officials and their superiors at Fort William in Calcutta, and examines the wider implications of that relationship for Indian society.

The book brings to the fore the manner in which the Company’s roots in India were established despite its limited military resources and lack of governmental experience. It underlines how the early colonial polity was shaped by European administrators’ attitudes towards personal and corporate reputation, financial gain, and military governance.

A thoughtful intervention in understanding the impact of the Company’s government on Indian society, this volume will be of interest to researchers working within South Asian studies, British studies, administrative history, military history, and the history of colonialism.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

James Lees is a Research Advisor at Karlstad University in Sweden. He holds an MA and a PhD in Imperial and South Asian History from King’s College London. Dr Lees’s research has examined power relations and bureaucratic culture among the European civil servants of the East India Company state in the 18th and 19th century, with a particular focus on the use of armed force in a colonial context. He has worked in research administration and policy roles at universities and funding bodies, and also taught at universities in the UK and Asia.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. Introduction 2. The Company State after 1765 3. ‘The Essence of the State Itself’: Reputation and the Company’s Government 4. ‘A Gendarmerie of Last Resort’? The Roles of Armed Force, 1760–1820 5. Rangpur District, 1770–c. 1800 6. Chittagong District, 1760–c. 1800 7. The Company State in the 1820s 8. Conclusion

More info here

BOOK: Prabhash RANJAN, India and Bilateral Investment Treaties: Refusal, Acceptance, Backlash. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). ISBN 9780199493746, $65.00

(Source: OUP)

Oxford University Press is publishing a book dealing with the history of bilateral investment treaties (BITs) in India.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Many countries have started contesting international investment treaties that allow foreign corporations to sue sovereign States for alleged treaty breaches at international arbitration fora. This contestation has taken the form of either countries terminating their investment treaties or walking out of the investor-State dispute settlement (ISDS) system. India has also jumped on the contestation bandwagon. As a consequence of being sued by more than 20 foreign investors, India terminated close to 60 investment treaties and adopted a new model bilateral investment treaty (BIT) purportedly to balance investment protection with the host State's right to regulate. This book studies critically India's approach towards BITs by tracing its origin, evolution, and the current state of play. The book does so by locating it in India's economic policy in general and policy towards foreign investment in particular. India's approach towards BITs and its policy towards foreign investment were consistent with each other in the periods of economic nationalism (1947-1990) and economic liberalism (1991-2010). However, post 2010, India's approach to BITs has become protectionist while India's foreign investment policy continues to be liberal. In order to balance investment protection with the State's right to regulate, India needs to evolve its BIT practice based on the twin framework of international rule of law and embedded liberalism.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Prabhash Ranjan, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Law, South Asian University

Prabhash Ranjan teaches at the Faculty of Law, South Asian University, New Delhi.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword 
Acknowledgements 
1. Introduction
Phase I: Refusal 
2. Economic Nationalism: Refusal to Bilateral Investment Treaties
Phase II: Acceptance 
3. Economic Liberalism: Embracing Bilateral Investment Treaties
4. India's BITs: Mapping the Acceptance I
5. Mapping the Acceptance II
Phase III: Backlash 
6. BITs Come Home to Roost but No Philip Morris Moment Yet!
7. Mapping the Backlash: Once Bitten Many Times Shy!
8. The 2016 Indian Model BIT: Making the BIT Unworkable for Investors
9. Conclusion
Annexure 
Index 
About the Author

More information here

SEMINAR: Foundations of the Common Law 1215-1914: Launch of the Online Library (London, 3 October 2018)

(Source: IALS)

We have learned of a seminar that will be held on the launch of a new “Foundations of the Common Law Library”, which aims to become the most comprehensive historical legal resource for the first 800 years of the whole common law world (1215-1914). The event is free but advance booking required.

Date
03 Oct 2018, 17:00 to 03 Oct 2018, 19:00

Institute
Institute of Advanced Legal Studies

Type
Seminar

Venue
Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, 17 Russell Square, London WC1B 5DR

Description

Title: Foundations of the Common Law 1215-1914: Launch of the Library

Speaker:

Graham Greenleaf AM,  Professor of Law & Information Systems, UNSW Australia; Founding Co-Director & Senior Researcher, Australasian Legal Information Institute (AustLII); Asia-Pacific Editor, Privacy Laws & Business International Report (PLBIR); Latest book: Asian Data Privacy Laws (OUP 2014; paperback 2017);  Next book: Greenleaf & Lindsay Public Rights: Copyright's Public Domains (Cambridge, publishing July 2018).

Description:

The free access Foundations of the Common Law Library is a funded research infrastructure project co-ordinated by AustLII, which will build on the CommonLII platform the most comprehensive historical legal resource for the first 800 years of the whole common law world (1215-1914). With the collaboration of ten free access international Legal Information Institutes, and other partners, it will include reported cases from superior courts in all common law jurisdictions, from the earliest decisions in each jurisdiction. Databases of other key materials (treatises, legislation, treaties etc) will also be added. Case law extracted from newspaper prior to formal law reporting will be included where possible. Citations for all documents added will expand greatly the LawCite automated citator’s coverage of the history of the whole of the common law world, linking the past and present of the common law.

For further information on the Foundation of the Common Law 1215-1914 Online Library, see here

This event is free but advanced booking is required.  All welcome.

More information here

BOOK: Aditya SARKAR, Trouble at the Mill. Factory Law and the Emergence of Labour Question in Late Nineteenth-Century Bombay. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). ISBN 9780199474424, £37.99

(Source: Oxford University Press)

Oxford University Press has published a new book on labour history and factory law in late 19^th century Bombay.

ABOUT THE BOOK

The book uses the Factory Acts of the late nineteenth century as an entry point into the early history of labour relations in India, specifically the mill industry of Bombay. It unites legal and social history in a manner which differs from most social histories of labour, and offers a new perspective on the constitution of industrial relations in colonial India.

The Factory Act passed by the Government of British India in 1881 produced the first official definition of 'factories' in modern Indian history as workplaces using steam power and regularly employing over 100 workers. It imposed certain minimal restrictions upon the freedom of employers in a limited range of industrial workplaces and invested factory workers, most explicitly children, with a slim set of immunities and entitlements. In 1891, the Factory Act was amended: factories were redefined as workplaces employing over 50 workers, the upper age limit of legal 'protection' was raised, weekly holidays were established, and women mill-workers were brought within its ambit. In its own time, factory law was experienced as a minor official initiative, but it connected with some of the most potent ideological debates and political oppositions of the age.

This book takes these two pieces of labour legislation as an entry point into the history of 'industrial relations' (the term did not yet exist in its present sense) in colonial India, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century combining the legal and social history which diverges from most studies of Indian workers. It identifies an emergent 'factory question' built on the problem of protective labour legislation. The cotton-mill industry of Bombay, long familiar to labour historians as one of the nodal points of modern Indian capitalism, is the principal focal point of this investigation. While this is a book about law and regulation, it is neither a legislative nor a policy history. While it is preoccupied with the history of factory legislation, it does not offer a full narrative that takes this as its 'object'. And while the book focuses on Bombay's cotton mills, it contains significant departures both from the city and its major industry. A number of questions which have only rarely been thematized by labour historians-the ideologies of factory reform, the politics of factory commissions, the routines of factory inspection, and the earliest waves of strike action in the cotton textile industry-are raised in this book.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Aditya Sarkar is a social historian working on the history of modern South Asia, with specific expertise and interest in the social histories of labour and capitalism.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction
Part I THE BIRTH OF FACTORY REGULATION
1: Imperial Entanglements
2: The Emergence of Factory Law: Bombay, 1874-1881
Part II THE LIFE OF A LAW
3: The Work of Law: Factory Inspection in Bombay, 1881-1887
4: Law, Age, and the Factory Child
Part III FACTORY LAW AND INDUSTRIAL POLITICS
5: The Antinomies of Industrial Relations, 1884-1895.
6: Snapping The Tie: Chronicles of the Plague Years, 1896-98
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
About the author

More information here

BOOK: Julia STEPHENS, Governing Islam - Law, Empire and Secularism in South Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). ISBN 9781107173910, £ 62.99

(Source: Cambridge University Press)

Cambridge University Press has just published a book which looks at the relation of colonial laws to contemporary struggles between Islam and secularism.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Governing Islam traces the colonial roots of contemporary struggles between Islam and secularism in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. The book uncovers the paradoxical workings of colonial laws that promised to separate secular and religious spheres, but instead fostered their vexed entanglement. It shows how religious laws governing families became embroiled with secular laws governing markets, and how calls to protect religious liberties clashed with freedom of the press. By following these interactions, Stephens asks us to reconsider where law is and what it is. Her narrative weaves between state courts, Islamic fatwas on ritual performance, and intimate marital disputes to reveal how deeply law penetrates everyday life. In her hands, law also serves many masters - from British officials to Islamic jurists to aggrieved Muslim wives. The resulting study shows how the neglected field of Muslim law in South Asia is essential to understanding current crises in global secularism.

Provides a historical foundation for understanding contemporary debates about Islam, law, and secularism

Combines colonial legal archives with vernacular legal sources

Explains why Islamic law has occupied such a pivotal role in global debates about the relationship between religion and the state

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Julia Stephens, Rutgers University, New Jersey

Julia Stephens is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Rutgers University, New Jersey. Her research and teaching span the fields of modern South Asian history, law, Islam, colonialism, and gender. Her writings have appeared in History Workshop Journal, Law and History Review, Modern Asian Studies, and the Journal of British History.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of maps and figures

Acknowledgments

Note on translation, transliteration, and abbreviations

Introduction

1. Forging secular legal governance

2. Personal law and the problem of marital property

3. Taming custom

4. Ritual and the authority of reason

5. Pathologizing Muslim sentiment

6. Islamic economy – a forgone alternative

Conclusion

Select bibliography

Index.

More information with the publisher