This highly rewarding book stands at an obvious distance from the topics that typically comprise the history of work and labour relations. For the attentive reader, however, it will illuminate otherwise easily missed paths by which legal-institutional and intellectual history intersect with the more marked social, cultural, and political currents that have formed the context for the making and remaking of global labour history. Even for the more casual if still critical reader, the distance should be traversed easily enough given the recognizable genre of insight its author works within: of untangling the strands of modernity’s myth making, especially around the development of its own supposedly key attributes, through demonstrating the obscured or, as Govind puts it, “mask[ed]” (p. 327), particularities of colonial encounter through which they emerged. Here, it is the untangling of Western juridico-political modernity’s narrative around the rise of parliamentary sovereignty (with its allied notions of jurisdiction and propertied subjecthood) and the particularities of British colonialism’s pre-twentieth-century encounter with the South Asian subcontinent that are at hand.
For those familiar with the historiography of Western legal and political thought, Govind’s focus will be at least partly predictable from his title, a clever nod to German historian Ernst Kantorowicz’s canonical 1957 work, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology. Of course, Kantorowicz’s own title is not merely a rhetorical flourish, but refers to a doctrine developed by centralizing monarchs in medieval Europe: the idea that the king possessed not only a mortal, physical body, but also an immortal one unbound by time. It was through this immortal body that the king exercised a sovereignty that was not simply personal but preternatural, persisting through each successive occupant of the throne. Systematic, yet plainly out of keeping with the theory-cum-liberal hagiography of representative democracy, this understanding of sovereignty, Govind contends, did not just disappear with the protracted advent of representative parliamentary bodies and the expansion of commercial society. As he puts it in the book’s conclusion,
this study of empire is an investigation of justice and jurisdiction, its stage as much as its masking. In this narrative, an economic history of trade is exposed as a determined militarized-legal practice of war and subjugation, which several historians have seen as an age of sociable commerce and roaring liberty keeping at bay a ‘night watchman state.’ In contrast, this work has described the political ecology in terms of a fierce maritime regulation ineluctably leading to military domination, from Prize laws to monopolization and military conquest (p. 327).
Bookended by a substantial Introduction and Conclusion, Govind’s inquiry into the persistence of the King’s perpetual body as the conceptual underpinning of sovereignty, alongside “justice and jurisdiction”, unfolds over three lengthy “Parts”, each ranging from seventy to 100 pages. Eschewing a more standard chapter-based organization, this tripartite division marks a chronological progression from the seventeenth to eighteenth to nineteenth centuries. Under the title “Sovereign Kingship: Multiplying Jurisdictions and Degrees of Allegiance in the Seventeenth Century”, Part One commences the inquiry, focusing largely, if not exclusively, on the English juridical context. In so doing, it argues for an essential continuity between early modernity in England and its aftermath with respect to the construction of sovereignty and political subjecthood. Here, more specifically, Govind takes us into a series of important judicial cases with implications for “the laws of war and conquest” (p. 3) and their treatment by key thinkers, including Matthew Hale, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke.
The first of these cases is the 1608 Calvin’s Case, which Govind calls the Case of Postnati – a decision by the Exchequer holding that a child born in Scotland following the accession of the Scottish monarch James VI to the English throne in 1603 was an English subject under common law. For Govind, Postnati is crucial for the way it affirmed the idea “of the King as the supreme head of the body-politic” and “the fulcrum of various forms of law-jurisdictions that were differentiated in space, from the kingdoms of Scotland and Ireland to ‘outposts’ in the Americas” (p. 53), as well as for affirming that the “subjects in Scotland” could “inherit in England as the King’s subjects” (p. 57). Functioning as a leitmotif to which the author repeatedly returns throughout the book, Postnati serves as the point of departure from which the book traces the ongoing centrality of kingship to the conceptualization of sovereignty and subjecthood, alike, notwithstanding predominant ideas to the contrary about the parliamentary displacement of royal authority. The book’s argumentation follows its subtitular reference to “Prize laws”, which, for Govind, marks a key but neglected legal domain for connecting the king’s perpetual body to the juridical legitimation of conquest, a connection explored by figures including Hale, Hobbes, and Locke. In this context – particularly through a discussion of the King’s Prerogative and the branches of prize law in the conclusion to Part One – the book introduces its concerns with the East India Company.
Part Two extends the main lines of analysis, picking up with Campbell v. Hall, a famed 1774 decision by Lord Mansfield in which the King’s Bench held forth on the validity of a tax imposed in Grenada, which had been ceded to Britain by France in 1763. Elaborating on the king’s constitutional authority over Britain’s colonies, including the monarch’s extra-parliamentary law-making power, Mansfield’s decision also established a limitation on such legislative (and taxing) power in the event that a representative assembly was conferred on the conquered territory. Campbell thus provides a ready connection to Part Two’s more sustained discussion of the East India Company and, specifically, its early territorial conquests in the subcontinent and the first half century of judicial controversy this engendered. Working under the title of “The King and the Body-Politic in Metastasis”, Part Two thus broadly treats the theme of “Conquest Perfecting Law in the Eighteenth Century”. In so doing, it also furthers the book’s engagement with the law governing the distribution of Prize money, which proves crucial in Govind’s telling of the Company’s ascent.
Part Two also refracts these themes through the more familiar lens of the famed impeachment trial of Warren Hastings, the first Governor of the Company’s Presidency in Bengal, as well as through a consideration of several of Jeremy Bentham’s texts. In particular, the reading of Bentham is used to press the book’s case against the traditional hero narrative of sovereignty’s development through an “abstract competition” witnessing the “subordinat[ion] of the King in this sole capacity to the institution of Parliament”. Here, instead, the book demands that any such competition be reckoned with through “account[ing] for concrete territorial-jurisdictional orders” like thiose issued by the Company in Bengal (p. 208). At this juncture, the reader is introduced to a comparison with “the American colonies”, with Govind emphasizing how the “nexus between liberty, property and representation” licenced resistance to “parliamentary taxation” in a way that was entirely missing in colonial India for at least another century (p. 209).
This dispute – centring on the representation-less despotism of the Company’s rule in India – and thus the status of its literally “right-less subjects” (p. 271) – is pursued even more intently in Part Three. Under the title “The King and His Epistemic Masks”, Part Three’s overarching concern is with “Empire, Prize, and the Making of International Law in the Nineteenth Century”. Replete once more with insight, Part Three sees the author pressing several of the book’s previous claims, including through his argument against “[t]he so-called modernity of centralization, territorialization and legislation” being “accounted for […] by dreams and fantasies of such modernity” instead of “the ghostly archaic of the King’s many bodies” (p. 272). More specifically, the reader is treated to a discussion of “the nature and category of the subject in India prior to 1858”, which unfolds in two divisions: first, through a consideration of famed Bengali reformer Rammohan Roy’s role as ambassador for one of the last of the nominal Mughal Emperors, Akbar Shah II, and his effort to contest the alleged violation by the colonial state of the treaty it had reached with him; and, second, a discussion of the famed Decan Prize Money case, “concerning the principles of the distribution of booty/Prize” in the context of the third Anglo-Maratha war (p. 236).
Part Three concludes with the “epistemic masking” of colonial contexts, such as that of the subcontinent – in dominant narratives of the development of international law. Here, Govind focuses on the juridical exclusion of the “indirectly ruled” princely states of British India, highlighting their juridical construction as “immune to” international law (p. 291). This discussion builds, in part, on a consideration of the conceptual and historical “repression of the role of the King” (p. 262) by influential nineteenth-century jurists such as John Austin and Henry Maine. By tracing international law’s emergence through the exclusion of the princely states, Govind offers a kind of pre-history of the juridical category of the protectorate under high imperialism – one that also brings the study full circle, back to the “seeds sown as far back as the earliest Company conquests emerging form the surf of marine sovereignty” (p. 291).
Thoughtful, challenging, and stylishly written, Govind’s study brims with both analytical and normative insight. For example, its account of the development of international law can be profitably compared to work in the field such as Anthonie Anghie’s Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law (2007). To observe that the account provided in The King’s Plunder, The King’s Bodies so emphatically resists the familiar approach of reading the protracted catalogue of great thinkers against the grain, is, in itself, to pay Govind’s study the highest of compliments – without casting aspersions on Anghie’s classic. Indeed, Govind’s indirect and elliptical account of the emergence of international law is demonstrative of the distinct brand of insight the historian with regional expertise – arguably, more so than a legal historian – is uniquely positioned to offer.
With respect to the book’s normative insights, The King’s Plunder, the King’s Bodies can perhaps most usefully be summed up by completing the quotation from the Conclusion excerpted at the outset of this review:
[t]his is the ecosystem of ‘trade’ that birthed the empire in India […] It is in this institutional denial of participation in that through which one’s condition is in fact deeply determined that lies the essence of injustice, and to which augments about rights and democracy respond. If the imperial period exhibits this epistemically decoyed circuitry, the subsequent era of nation-states is hardly invulnerable to the same charge.
Indeed, as “a study of empire” comprising “an investigation of justice and jurisdiction” (p. 327, emphasis added), Govind’s work exemplifies what history writing informed by a widely read and theoretically well-versed temperament can achieve: namely, the denaturalization of the world as it seems to have been so as to indirectly illuminate that which may remain less than ideal in our own. And it does so without ever inviting the crude charge of “presentism”.
