The Conclusion revisits the takeaway messages of the book’s research strategy and empirical inquiry. Lawyering Imperial Encounters tells the story of the relentless hangover of the past in the present. Law remains the vernacular of Africa’s uneven and unequal relationship with the world economy precisely because it is imprinted by the past Scrambles into the continent. Foremost, law’s position as the cutting edge of Africa’s relationship with capitalism reflects legal imperialism as a core variable in the deployment of power. This is illustrated by the conversion of Hong Kong as a gateway for the expansion of Chinese business interests abroad, which builds, itself, on the globalisation of the Wall Street model of the corporate law firm.

Chapter 2 argues that imperial powers (Britain, France and Belgium) deployed a similar strategy of legal imperialism during the nineteenth-century Scramble for Africa. Indirect rule operationalised the contradiction that colonial power was weak in its effective reach, yet strong in the systemic upheavals it engendered. It also fostered legal and capitalist unevenness, what Benton and Ford (2016) call ‘lumpiness’. The chapter focuses on three crisis situations that were ostensibly solved through juridical means: the 1920s Gold Coast conflicts before the Privy Council; the 1895 Stokes-Lothaire incident before the High Council of the Congo Free State; and pre-independence military trials in French and British colonies. Together, these judicial crises help account for structural commonalities in the articulation of post-independence African states with the world economy: the deployment of merchant law with and without state sovereignty and middling as a durable though variable sovereign resource of the post-colonial state.