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Introduction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 October 2010

Elizabeth Kolsky
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Extract

How do we understand the relationship between law, power, and agency in colonial contexts? Broadly speaking, scholarly opinion is divided between those who view law as a core instrument of colonial control and those who emphasize the ways in which the complexities and ambiguities of colonial legal rule created room for maneuver and manipulation. The articles in this forum skillfully advance our insight into these issues by analyzing the workings of the personal law system in British India, with an emphasis on laws related to marriage. My introductory essay briefly summarizes the two primary approaches to the study of law and empire, clarifies the contribution of the articles to the broader literature, and draws out the thematic links that tie the forum together.

Type
Forum: Maneuvering the Personal Law System in Colonial India
Information
Law and History Review , Volume 28 , Issue 4 , November 2010 , pp. 973 - 978
Copyright
Copyright © the American Society for Legal History, Inc. 2010

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References

1. Guha, Ranajit, “Chandra's Death,” in Subaltern Studies V, ed. Guha, Ranajit (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987), 134–65Google Scholar.

2. Guha, Ranajit, A Rule of Property for Bengal: An Essay on the Idea of Permanent Settlement (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1982)Google Scholar.

3. Hussain, Nasser, The Jurisprudence of Emergency: Colonialism and the Rule of Law (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Travers, Robert, Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth Century India: The British in Bengal, 1757–93 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4. Kolsky, Elizabeth, Colonial Justice in British India: White Violence and the Rule of Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009)Google Scholar.

5. Behal, Rana P. and Mohapatra, Prabhu P., “‘Tea and Money versus Human Life’: The Rise and Fall of the Indenture System in the Assam Tea Plantations, 1840–1908,” Journal of Peasant Studies 19 (3/4) (1992): 142–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6. 10 and 11 Geo VI, c. 30.

7. Sally Engle Merry's work provides a good example of this approach. Merry, , Colonizing Hawai’i: The Cultural Power of Law (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000)Google Scholar.

8. Cohn, Bernard, “Law and the Colonial State in India,” in Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 57–75Google Scholar.

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10. The Ottoman Empire adopted a different model for dealing with minority religious communities. The Ottomans extended to non-Muslim groups a large degree of judicial autonomy by allowing then to litigate most of their legal affairs under their own laws in their own communal courts. The Ottomans also permitted non-Muslims to litigate personal matters in shari’a courts if they chose to (al-Qattan, Najwa, “Dhimmis in the Muslim Court: Legal Autonomy and Religious Discrimination,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 31 (3) (1999): 429–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

11. Spivak, Gayatri, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and Interpretation of Culture, ed. Nelson, Cary and Grossberg, Lawrence (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 297Google Scholar.