CALL FOR PAPERS: Iustoria 2026: In the Shadow of Empires (Belgrade: University of Belgrade, 11-13 MAY 2026) [DEADLINE 15 APR 2026]

 

Iustoria 2026: In the Shadow of Empires

The University of Belgrade Faculty of Law is now receiving paper proposals for the Sixth student conference on legal history – the Iustoria 2026, to be held on May 11^th-13^th, 2026, its topic being “In the Shadow of Empires”.

In 2026, we mark the 1,550th anniversary of the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 – an event that reshaped the map and destiny of Europe at the time. Nevertheless, this political collapse could not erase a thousand years of the development of Roman law, which later returned to Western Europe through the rediscovery of the Digest and the work of numerous schools that studied and applied Roman law, from the glossators to the pandectists. By contrast, in the Eastern Roman – Rhomaian – Byzantine Empire, Roman law, increasingly enriched with Greek and Christian components, continued to develop for another thousand years, exerting a significant influence on many neighbouring lands, above all the Slavic countries. In order to commemorate this important anniversary, we seek to invite discussion on the emergence, development, dissemination, and influence of the legal systems of empires and imperial polities – from the Roman Empire and other great empires of antiquity, through their successors in the medieval and modern periods, up to today’s informal empires that extend their influence through an order that formally proclaims the equality of peoples and democracy.

Research may focus on the legal organization of empires themselves from various perspectives – or on their relations with other states (including numerous issues of international law and the use of force), as well as on transplants from their laws into other legal systems, whether imposed or voluntarily adopted. It is also legitimate to pose the question – either at a theoretical level or through concrete case studies – which characteristics distinguish the law of an empire from the law of a small nation-state. Across different empires throughout history, we can find examples of both cosmopolitanism and discrimination, making it particularly interesting to consider whether an empire tends to view its inhabitants primarily as citizens endowed with rights or as subjects who chiefly owe it obligations, what is required to acquire citizenship, and how its legal system treats those who do not possess it. Whatever constitutes the principal basis of power of a given empire – whether military conquest, slavery, or “soft power” – will inevitably be reflected in its legal system, allowing us to trace the emergence and development of many specific legal institutions.

All students of undergraduate and post-graduate studies pertaining to law or other humanities are eligible to apply for the conference. The applications should contain basic personal information (name and surname, faculty, department, level and year of study), along with an extended abstract containing between 500 and 1000 words. Applications are accepted in either Serbian or English.

The applications should be e-mailed to iustoria@ius.bg.ac.rs before April 15^th, 2026. The students will be informed by April 20^th whether or not their application has been accepted. For any additional information you may enquire at the same e-mail address, and important news will also be published at the official Facebook page of the conference – https://www.facebook.com/iustoria

Just like on our previous conferences, apart from the presentations given by their colleagues, the students at the conference will have an opportunity to attend several lectures given by renowned experts – more details on this will be available in the final version of the programme.

The conference will be held in a hybrid format: both in-person and online participation will be possible. We'll do our best to secure accommodations either in student dormitories or with student host families for participants who don’t reside in Belgrade and who wish to participate in person. These arrangements will depend on the number of available spots. 

The final versions of the papers presented at the conference, with final changes and corrections submitted within a reasonable time after the conference, will be submitted for publication in the journal „Vesnik pravne istorije / Herald of Legal History“ (http://epub.ius.bg.ac.rs/index.php/Vesnik/index). The deadline for the submission of papers is July 15th 2026.

BOOK: Manuel HERRERO SÁNCHEZ, Jonatán OROZCO CRUZ & Pedro CARDIM (eds.), The Asiento System and the Transatlantic Trade in Enslaved Africans (circa 1580–1750) [The Atlantic World, ed. Benjamin SCHMIDT & Wim KLOOSTER; vol. 41] (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2026), xiv + 374 p. ISBN 978-90-04-54929-6, € €157.94

 

(image source: Brill)

Abstract:

This is the first edited volume to focus explicitly on the asiento, the contractual framework that regulated the transatlantic slave trade to Spanish America between the late sixteenth and mid-eighteenth centuries. As the mechanism that structured a vast system of human trafficking – one of the foundational tragedies of the modern world – the asiento functioned as a legal, political, and commercial instrument of empire. Drawing on new archival research in multiple languages and from repositories across the Atlantic, the chapters trace the negotiated nature of these contracts, the transimperial flows they enabled, and the roles played by formal and informal agents of diverse social, ethnic, and institutional backgrounds. Contributors are: Pedro Cardim, Christopher Ebert, Manuel F. Fernández Chaves, Alejandro García Montón, Miguel Geraldes Rodrigues, Manuel Herrero Sánchez, Wim Klooster, Thiago Krause, Maximiliano Mac Menz, Joseph Mainberger, Ramona Negrón, Linda Newson, Jonatán Orozco Cruz, Edgar Pereira, William Pettigrew, Filipa Ribeiro da Silva, Klaus Weber, and David Wheat.

 On the editors:

Manuel Herrero Sánchez is Professor of Early Modern History at Pablo de Olavide University in Seville. His research focuses on the comparative approach to the history of the Dutch Republic and Genoa, and on the Spanish Monarchy considered as a polycentric imperial structure composed of urban republics. Jonatán Orozco Cruz is Predoctoral Researcher at Pablo de Olavide University, where he is developing his PhD dissertation Transnational Social Networks Connecting Imperial Spaces: the Spanish Monarchy and the Slave Asiento (1675–1694) under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Manuel Herrero Sánchez. Pedro Cardim is Associate Professor of History at Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal. He has published widely on Iberian history, early modern legal history, and Portuguese colonisation of Brazil.

Rad more here: DOI  10.1163/9789004549296.

ADVANCE ARTICLE: Stan PANNIER, "Habsburg in Havana. Outsider Participation in the Spanish Empire: the Slaving Licence of Romberg & Consors of Ghent, 1780–90", Itinerario [OPEN ACCESS]

 

(image source: itinerario)

Abstract:

The history of European overseas expansion has traditionally been studied from a national perspective. However, the rise of Atlantic history, global history, and a revitalized maritime history has prompted scholars to question the rigidity of Early Modern borders assumed by these conventional national or imperial frameworks. In parallel, researchers have contested the state-centric viewpoint by advocating for an actor-focused approach to Atlantic System history, emphasizing the role of private merchants and their informal, international networks. These approaches have uncovered the involvement of entrepreneurs belonging to polities without a formal empire in the colonial ventures of other nations. This paper examines one such trans-imperial enterprise: Romberg & Consors, a firm operating from the Austrian Netherlands. During and after the American War of Independence (1775–83), Romberg & Consors leveraged evolving Spanish attitudes toward the slave trade and the establishment of neutral trade to organize slave trade expeditions to Cuba. By closely analyzing the operations of this Imperial firm, this study illuminates a decisive phase in Spanish imperial history while contributing to the often-overlooked Atlantic history of the Habsburg Monarchy and the Austrian Netherlands.

DOI 10.1017/S0165115325000026. 

BOOK: Edward JONES CORREDERA (ed.), Supplicant Empires. Searching for the Iberian World in Global History [Habsburg Worlds] (Turnhout: Brepols, 2025), 250 p. ISBN 9782503611211

 

(image source: Brepols)

On the editor:

Is a Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law (Heidelberg) and a Lecturer at the UNED (Madrid).

Table of contents:

Edward Jones Corredera (Max Planck Institute, Heidelberg, and UNED, Madrid)
Introduction: Who Prayed for the Iberian World? Incomparable Empires & Global History

Tamar Herzog (Harvard University)
Is Spain Exceptional? Reflections on Thirty Years of Research and Writing

Pedro Cardim (Universidade Nova de Lisboa)
Corporations, normative pluralism, and jurisdictions in early modern Iberia: The potential and the limitations of an interpretive framework

Marcos Reguera (Universidad del País Vasco)
From Manifest Destiny to “destino manifiesto”: the Hispanic Reception and Formulations of Manifest Destiny

Bethany Aram (Universidad Pablo de Olavide)
Comparative approaches to gender, ethnicity and empires: Britain & Spain

Marta Manzanares (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid)
Rethinking the Place of Sugar in Eighteenth-Century Spain

Fabien Montcher (University of St. Louis)
Imperial Blind Spots: Indeterminacy and Thickness across the Iberian Monarchies

David Martín Marcos (UNED)
Rustics and Barbarians: Otherness and Counter-hegemony in the Early Modern Iberian World

Interviews:

Bartolomé Yun-Casalilla (Universidad Pablo de Olavide), Amanda Scott (Pennsilvania State University), Juan Pimentel (CSIC), José Maria Portillo (Universidad del País Vasco), Maria Gago (European University Institute), Javier Rodríguez (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid), and Thiago Krause (Wayne State University)

 Read more here.

LECTURE: Tamar HERZOG, "The history(s) of Empire: Where Do We Go From Here and What Should We See on The Way?" [JHIL Lecture] (Leuven: KULeuven, 25 APR 2025)

 

(image source: Harvard)

Announcement by prof. Inge Van Hulle (KULeuven):

We are pleased to host the upcoming JHIL Lecture, on the occasion of the board meeting of the Journal of the History of International Law/Revue d'histoire du droit international, which will be held in Leuven this year. 

Practicalia:

The lecture will take place on Friday April 25, from 12pm till 1.30pm in the conference room of the International House (Tiensestraat 47, Leuven). RSVP by 23 April with inge dot vanhulle at kuleuven dot be.

(source: KULeuven Roman Law and Legal History newsletter)

BOOK: Antonio Manuel HESPANA, Filhos da Terra. Mestizos Identities at the Margins of Portuguese Imperial Expansion (ed. Cátia A.P. ANTUNES/transl. Noelle RICHARDSON) [European Expansion and Indigenous Response, ed. George Bryan SOUZA; 45] (Leiden/Boston: Martinus Nijhoff/Brill, 2021), 421 p. ISBN 978-90-04-71350-5, € 135

 

(image source: Brill)

Abstract:

Filhos da Terra narrates the history over time of the so-called ‘Portuguese communities’ living outside the boundaries of the Portuguese Empire but identified locally and by other European empires as ‘Portuguese’. Concepts such as ‘tribe’, ‘diaspora’, and ‘society of métissage’ have been widely used to define these groups.

On the author, editor and contributors:

Cátia Antunes, Zoltan Biedermann, Tamar Herzog, Noelle Richardson, Sophie Rose, and Ângela Barreto Xavier.  António Manuel Hespanha was Professor of Legal History and Theory of Law at the Faculty of Law, Nova University of Lisbon. His major work As Vésperas do Leviathan (1986) was groundbreaking in establishing a new history of the political institutions and of the nature of the State in Portugal in the Early Modern period. A prolific writer, he was guest professor at Yale University, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, University of Macau and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris). He was also the General Commissioner for the Commemoration of the Portuguese Discoveries Committee (1995-1998). For all his academic, intellectual, and political contributions, he was awarded the honor of Grand Official of the Military Order of Sant’Iago da Espada (2000) by the President of the Republic of Portugal, Jorge Sampaio.

Table of contents:

General Series Editor’s Preface
List of Illustrations
Foreword: Filhos da Terra in English – The Raison D’Être [OPEN ACCESS]
The Legal Dimensions of Empire: Filhos da Terra and the Normative Order [OPEN ACCESS]
Portuguese Identity, Métissage and Liminality  [OPEN ACCESS]
Translator’s Note [OPEN ACCESS]
Glossary [OPEN ACCESS]

Introduction
 1 A ‘Portuguese’ Identity?
 2 The Analytical Perspective

1 Chapter title to be come
 1 The Portuguese ‘Informal Empire’
 2 The ‘Shadow Empire’
 3 Developments in the ‘Historiography of the Atlantic’

2 Chapter title to be come
 1 Methodological Approaches in the Historiography of the ‘Informal Empire’
 2 Notes of Caution
 3 Observing Identity: Methodological Questions

3 Chapter title to be come
 1 The ‘Provinces of the Shadow Empire
 2 Guinea
 3 The Americas
 4 Angola
 5 Mozambique
 6 The Indian Ocean and South Asia
 7 Mainland Southeast Asia
 8 The Far East

4 Chapter title to be come
 1 The ‘Portuguese Tribe’

5 Chapter title to be come
 1 Power and Governance in the ‘Shadow Empire’

6 Chapter title to be come
 1 Questions of Identity: External Differentiation and Internal Homogeneity

7 Chapter title to be come
 1 The Universalism of the Portuguese

Afterthoughts: Conversing about Diversity in Empire

Bibliography
Index  [OPEN ACCESS]

Read more here: DOI 10.1163/9789004713512. 

CALL FOR PAPERS: Beyond Development: Mapping Legal Entanglements between Africa and Europe (Vienna: Faculty of Law, 4-5 DEC 2025); DEADLINE 28 FEB 2025

  

The Department of Legal and Constitutional History and the African Law Association jointly invite scholars to participate in the interdisciplinary conference on the topic “Beyond Development: Mapping Legal Entanglements between Africa and Europe”, which will take place from 4 to 5 December 2025 at the Faculty of Law of the University of Vienna, Austria.

The event will also be the 49th Annual Conference of the African Law Association.

Outline of the Conference

The Portuguese colonies in Africa gained their independence 50 years ago. Although colonialism in Africa was by no means over in 1975, this date is regarded in global history as an important turning point for the political and legal independence of the African continent. The conference aims to mark this anniversary by reflecting on the past and considering the future from a legal perspective.

We invite contributions, firstly, about the relationships between the newly independent states and the former colonial empires at the intergovernmental (international law), diplomatic and economic levels, as well as in international organizations. The conference aims to provide a forum for discussing postcolonial criticism directed at outdated romanticization of development, on the one hand, and simplistic narratives of progress on the other. Which conclusions and assessments can be reached when using law as a criterion for analysis?

Secondly, the conference focuses on legal developments since independence and is interested in both grand narratives and micro-studies. The focus is on the topics of constitutional law and reform, regional inner-African legal integration, the regulation of the environment and the economy, human rights, and developments in private law in African countries, also in relation to non-state law.

Thirdly, we explicitly invite conceptual work; conventional descriptions and categories in these areas should be subjected to critical re-reading. The focus here is on interdependencies between Europe and Africa. This also includes the question of the extent to which legal developments on the African continent have triggered reforms in former colonial empires. We are particularly interested in the migration of ideas and people, the African diaspora in the former empires, and non-state networks as actors in the past and present of law.

Panels

When submitting your contribution, please indicate one or more of the following panels to which your topic should be assigned:

Panel 1: Legal entanglements between Africa and Europe

Panel 2: Postcolonial legal systems and non-state law

Panel 3: Regional integration, international organizations and international law

Panel 4: Constitution-making and constitutional reform

Panel 5: Environmental and economic regulation, human rights

Submission

Please submit your abstract in PDF format to lawinafrica.rechtsgeschichte@univie.ac.at and include the following:

 - Title of the submitted paper

 - Panel to which the paper should be assigned

- Abstract of 250–500 words

- Name(s) of the author(s)

- Affiliation(s) of the author(s)

Please note: The language for submitted contributions and of the conference is English. Manuscripts should be original contributions, and by submitting a paper, you accept that the organizers expect you to contribute a corresponding article to the conference proceedings!

The organizers will apply for funding to help cover travel and accommodation costs, especially for researchers from the Global South. However, we will only be able to confirm the extent of cost coverage at a later stage, so participants should be prepared in principle to cover their own costs.

Timeline

Abstract submission deadline 28 February 2025

Notification sent to participants 17 March 2025

(image: Juridicum, Vienna University)

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. 

BOOK: Lauren BENTON. They Called it Peace: Worlds of Imperial Violence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2024), 304 p., ISBN 9780691248479

 

(image source: Princeton)

Abstract:

Imperial conquest and colonization depended on pervasive raiding, slaving, and plunder. European empires amassed global power by asserting a right to use unilateral force at their discretion. They Called It Peace is a panoramic history of how these routines of violence remapped the contours of empire and reordered the world from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries. In an account spanning from Asia to the Americas, Lauren Benton shows how imperial violence redefined the very nature of war and peace. Instead of preparing lasting peace, fragile truces ensured an easy return to war. Serial conflicts and armed interventions projected a de facto state of perpetual war across the globe. Benton describes how seemingly limited war sparked atrocities, from sudden massacres to long campaigns of dispossession and extermination. She brings vividly to life a world in which warmongers portrayed themselves as peacemakers and Europeans imagined “small” violence as essential to imperial rule and global order. Holding vital lessons for us today, They Called It Peace reveals how the imperial violence of the past has made perpetual war and the threat of atrocity endemic features of the international order.

On the author:

Lauren Benton is the Barton M. Biggs Professor of History at Yale University and recipient of the Toynbee Prize for significant contributions to global history. Her books include A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900 and (with Lisa Ford) Rage for Order: The British Empire and the Origins of International Law, 1800–1850.

Read more here. 

JOURNAL: Law and History Review XLI (2023), No. 3

 

(image source: CUP)

Articles

Paper Empires: Layers of Law in Colonial South Asia and the Indian Ocean (Nandini Chatterjee, Alicia Schrikker & Dries Lyna)
DOI 10.1017/S0738248023000081
Abstract:

Anthropologists and historians have recently underscored the ways in which European colonialism created novel regimes of legality and record-keeping, associated with ambitious and exclusive state-centered claims to both truth and rights, while being inevitably and constantly sucked into eddies of forgery and corruption. However, attention so far has been focused on English/European-language records and the colonial institutions that produced, stored, and deployed them. This has communicated a monolithic sense of power and normativity that unwittingly replicates the aspirations of colonial states. Drawing on eight case studies from in and around South Asia from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, we propose instead that the law of empires was rooted in the highly localized, often multilingual, and fragmented bureaucracies that produced its records. Here, historians of pre-colonial Indian regimes join hands with historians of British, Dutch, and French colonialism in order to unearth the genealogies of records written in Bengali, Marathi, Persian, Sinhala, and Tamil, as well as in French, Dutch, and English. This special issue collectively excavates the many layers, regimes, and languages in which legally effective records were produced by imperial regimes in South Asia and its much larger watery penumbra, the Indian Ocean.

An Empire in Disguise: The Appropriation of Pre-Existing Modes of Governance in Dutch South Asia, 1650–1800 (Alicia Schrkker & Byapti Sur) (OPEN ACCESS)
DOI 10.1017/S0738248022000554
Abstract:

This article presents an analysis of the paper- and office work at two South Asian corners in the early modern Dutch empire. The article engages with current approaches to the histories of bureaucracy and empire that emphasize the lived experience of “paperwork” in order to gain a localized understanding of what constituted empire. The article focuses on the production and use of pattas, olas, and thombos in the offices of the Dutch zamindar-fiscaal in Chinsurah (Bengal) and the Dutch disāva in Jaffna (Sri Lanka). Dutch bureaucracy in these spaces was entrenched in local practices, and created through processes of layering and blending, as evidenced by material and linguistic characteristics. The deeds and registers recorded essential aspects of life such as labor, marriage, and transactions of property, and the article shows how such paperwork mattered to villagers in Chinsurah and Jaffna. The production of the deeds and registers itself could include a public spectacle, and we argue that this performative aspect of the local bureaucracy added to the perceived relevance of the paperwork. Furthermore, through an analysis of legal cases we reconstruct the use and abuse of these bureaucracies by Dutch officials and local inhabitants, which signifies a parasitical relationship that is characteristic of so many imperial and colonial spaces. Through a focus on the local bureaucratic practices, the authors shed new light on questions about the character of the Dutch empire, where things never turned out to be exactly as they appeared at first sight.

Material Pluralism and Symbolic Violence: Palm Leaf Deeds and Paper Land Grants in Colonial Sri Lanka, 1680–1795 (Dries Lyna & Luc Bulten) (OPEN ACCESS)
DOI 10.1017/S0738248022000426
Abstract:

This article studies the registration practices of land and property on palm leaf deeds (olas) in Sri Lanka, in relationship to the advent of paper land grants (giftebrieven) under the Dutch East India Company (VOC)’s rule in the long eighteenth century. A database of about 2500 Dutch land grant deeds and translated olas, ranging from 1685 to 1795 are contextualised via judicial records of Dutch civil courts, where (translated) olas were regularly used as evidence. Not only does this allow us to track the geographical encroachment of Dutch power over coastal Sri Lanka as part of a colonial transition, but at the same time shift the perspective to study which individuals and communities on the island engaged with Dutch land bureaucracy. In doing so, we showcase the continued importance of traditional ola deeds and (pre-)colonial registers for both local land owners and the colonial bureaucracy itself, regardless of the Dutch government’s push for paper, attempted to delegitimise the local ola recordings, and acts of symbolic violence to infringe on both the materiality as well as the perceived importance of palm leaf deeds. In the long eighteenth century several paper and palm leaf realities coexisted in Sri Lanka and at times conflicted, entangled, and convoluted within and outside the bureaucratic institutions to form what ‘material pluralism’ within a larger context of legal pluralities. 

The Power of Parwanas: Indo-Persian Grants and the Making of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Southern India (Leonard R. Hodges & Nandi Chatterjee) (OPEN ACCESS)
DOI 10.1017/S073824802200044X
Abstract:

This article examines Persian-language orders—parwanas—issued by regimes that succeeded the Mughal Empire in South Asia, to European trading companies. Focussing in particular on the mid-eighteenth-century exchanges between the Nizam of Hyderabad; the Nawab of Arcot; and the French Compagnie des Indes, we see how Mughal-style parwanas, or sub-imperial orders, previously used to give instructions or to make or withdraw grants, were transformed into a form of political currency. They were now used to exchange military and fiscal resources between South Asian state-builders and militarised European corporations, and to secure political legitimacy for all within a putative Mughal imperium. Moreover, the legal fiction of Mughal sovereignty led to a grants race, such that rivals—European and South Asian—sought more and more parwanas, while also querying the legitimacy of authorities that issued them. The very fragility of the Mughal empire and the lability of the political landscape in eighteenth-century South Asia was thus generative of prolific Persian legal documentation, as well as its rewiring to novel uses. European empire-builders negotiated this legal landscape with only partial literacy, consequently fetishizing the material aspects and ceremonial accompaniments of Persian legal documents, and according them power beyond their immediate substance. 

Registering and Regulating Family Life: The School Thombos in Dutch Sri Lanka (Bente de Leede & Nadeera Rupesinghe) (OPEN ACCESS)
DOI 10.1017/S0738248022000499
Abstract:

In eighteenth-century, colonial Sri Lanka, the Dutch church kept extensive registers of the local population. These “school thombos” contain individual registration of baptism, marriage, school attendance and death. This article argues that the school thombos reveal moral control over family life by the Dutch East India Company and the Dutch Reformed Church, while offering locals a legal and religious identity to employ in negotiating the Dutch colonial bureaucracy. These rarely studied registers shed new light on Sri Lankan family history and the practices of Dutch colonialism. What do they tell us about conjunctures of locals with colonial religion in eighteenth-century Sri Lanka? The school thombo was an instrument used to register and regulate family life, with specific functions and uses by different actors. This article explores the format, objectives and use of the school thombo. Why was the school thombo created and who were registered in these sources? What were the micro practices of drawing up the school thombo? The article is supported by several case studies that illustrate how the school thombo found its way into family life while demonstrating the value of written identities.

A New Language of Rule: Alwar's Administrative Experiment, c. 1838–58 (Elizabeth M. Thelen)
DOI 10.1017/S0738248022000657 (OPEN ACESS)
Abstract:

Many rulers of newly formed Indian Princely States enacted substantial administrative reforms in the first half of the nineteenth century as they sought to reinforce their power and secure revenue in the wake of British colonial conquest. In one such case, the ruler of Alwar, Banni Singh, recruited Aminullah Khan, a former record-keeper in Delhi's colonial courts, to serve as diwan (chief minister) and undertake administrative reforms starting in 1838. These reforms focused on agrarian taxation, the civil courts, and the military, and included changes to the roles of local officials, methods of record-keeping, and the language of governance. The reforms were encoded in seven slim volumes of regulations and model forms, handwritten in Persian. Through a study of these regulations, I situate the reforms of Alwar's administration within Banni Singh's broader self-fashioning as a modern ruler in a Mughal mode and show how the reforms drew from both Mughal and colonial ideas of statecraft. The regulations represented a shift toward a legalistic conception of that state as seen in the ideals of good governance that they espoused, and they constructed contractual relationships among villagers, low-level officials in the districts, and the central state through the extensive bureaucratic procedures that they encoded.

A True Copy? Documents and the Production of Legality in the Bombay Inam Commission (Dominic Vendell) (OPEN ACCESS)
DOI  10.1017/S0738248022000372
Abstract:

This essay examines the role of Indian-language documentation in the production of legality in colonial western India, focusing on the workings of the Bombay Inam Commission (1852-1863). It situates legal validation of claims to tax-free land revenue within the broader process of securing, organizing, classifying, and registering Marathi- and Persian-language documents. Combating the effects of rain, dirt, and pests on old state records often sold as “waste paper,” the Inam Commission deployed material interventions to secure a legal archive for verifying individual claims to property. While such evidence weighed heavily in the evaluation of the testimony and corroborating documents of an individual claimant’s case-file, questions of writing also shaped the legal reasoning of the Commission. Inquiries about any given document’s conformity to or deviation from conventional style figured prominently in judgments about its authenticity. The scribe Sayyid Usman’s investigation in 1856 of a date in a Persian document attributed to the Mysore ruler Tipu Sultan struggled to establish the parameters of conventional style against the plurality of entangled regimes of property. I argue that a material approach to writing allows us to better understand the imperfect and dispersed production of legal truth in imperial settings.

Oceanic Mobility and the Empire of the Pass System (Bhavani Raman) 
DOI 10.1017/S0738248022000542
Abstract:

From the age of empires to the apartheid regime in South Africa, pass laws have defined the scope of the mobility of subjects by relying on a paper document, the pass. This essay focusses on the pass document to understand the governance of mobility in the Indian ocean. In doing so, it shows how the pass document in its various forms through many centuries in fact, illuminates a form of inter-legal governance through which racialized life came to be constituted via convention and statute.

The Sailing Scribes: Circulating Law in the Twentieth-Century Indian Ocean (Fahad Ahmad Bishara)
DOI 10.1017/S0738248022000402
Abstract:

What did the practice of law look like on the high seas? This has been a matter of some discussion among legal historians, with the bulk of the evidence coming from encounters between European ships in the Atlantic and Asia. This article takes a different tack, taking as its starting point a series of contracts copied into the logbook of the early-twentieth century Arab dhow captain (nakhoda) ‘Abdulmajeed Al-Failakawi. Although some of these appear to have been contracts that the nakhoda entered into or witnessed, most were contractual templates that presented formulas for a variety of written obligations between members of the Indian Ocean maritime community. In reading these formulas alongside contracts left behind by Al-Failakawi and other Indian Ocean nakhodas, I reflect on how law circulated by members of an itinerant society of mariners that sought to forge the contours of a commercial world on their ships and across the waters, and weave it through an imperial seascape. I explore how workaday forms of law and legal epistemologies circulated around the maritime marketplaces of the Indian Ocean world, at the margins of a colonial and imperial political economy, through actors who read across different genres of literature, and who moved between the multiple roles of captain, navigator, supercargo, and scribe.

Persistence of Practice in Law's Parwana and Palm Leaf Empire (Paul D. Halliday)
DOI  10.1017/S0738248023000305
Abstract:

The essays in this forum demonstrate how attending to the intricacies of documentary practice provides a way to see legal practices over the long haul. Different materials—for instance, paper and palm leaves—manifested different ways of understanding and doing law. But change from one way of doing law to another is sticky; old practices persist alongside new ones. Appreciating this helps us see past apparent ruptures in ways of living brought about by states and empires as they come and go. By looking closely at the routines and physical materials through which law works, we can look past simple binaries: European vs. indigenous; pre-colonial vs. colonial; resistance vs. accommodation; oral vs. literate; manuscript vs. print; paper vs. palm leaf.

Read the articles here.