Property and Attachments: Defining Autonomy and the Claims of Family in Nineteenth-Century Western India

Extract

Historically, the abolition of slavery marked the signal moment that established a legal distinction between people and property: people could not be property. If slavery had been based on the potential equivalence or interchangeability of people and property, its abolition asserted an absolute legal and moral difference between them. Yet, these dichotomous ways of thinking about persons and things emerged alongside and in tension with a third way of thinking that they now obscured, in which property and personhood were closely linked—in which property tied people to communities, to particular histories, and to personal status; property was what was ‘proper’ to the person. While the trade in and ownership of persons has been broadly condemned, this connectedness of property and personhood has remained crucial to modern notions of the individual, privacy, and subjectivity. Indeed, the story of the emergence of the modern legal subject is often told as the progressive, if inevitably incomplete, process of publicly superceding this linkage of property and personal status, and limiting it to a demarcated private sphere. Such formulations construe the family as a domain where persons and things will necessarily continue to be linked, where relationships will inevitably blur affective, moral, and material claims, and where relationships of status will continue to prevail.