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.
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
Lyndsay Campbell is Professor in the Faculty of Law and Department of History, University of Calgary, Canada. Shaunnagh Dorsett is Distinguished Professor at the Faculty of Law, University of Technology Sydney, Australia.
