Overview
- Presents the conflict between two principles of colonial rule: the logic of law and the logic of emergency
- Explores the role of the King’s Court and its conflict with the East India Company in nineteenth-century India
- Argues that Indians’ everyday use of the King’s Court ultimately led to the curtailing of its power
Part of the book series: Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies (CIPCSS)
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Table of contents (7 chapters)
Keywords
About this book
This book takes a closer look at colonial despotism in early nineteenth-century India and argues that it resulted from Indians’ forum shopping, the legal practice which resulted in jurisdictional jockeying between an executive, the East India Company, and a judiciary, the King’s Court. Focusing on the collisions that took place in Bombay during the 1820s, the book analyses how Indians of various descriptions—peasants, revenue defaulters, government employees, merchants, chiefs, and princes—used the court to challenge the government (and vice versa) and demonstrates the mechanism through which the lawcourt hindered the government’s indirect rule, which relied on local Indian rulers in newly conquered territories. The author concludes that existing political anxiety justified the East India Company’s attempt to curtail the power of the court and strengthen their own power to intervene in emergencies through the renewal of the company’s charter in 1834. An insightful read for those researching Indian history and judicial politics, this book engages with an understudied period of British rule in India, where the royal courts emerged as sites of conflict between the East India Company and a variety of Indian powers.
Reviews
“Britain’s empire did not arrive fully formed in India. Haruki Inagaki’s superbly-researched, well-argued book traces its emergence in a proliferating set of arguments between different groups of British officers, who variously fought with and co-opted Indian elites. It traces the debates which raged amongst British officers about the character of Britain’s presence in India during the early nineteenth century, in doing so unravelling the fractured, debated character of the imperial enterprise itself. British India’s Imperial constitution was, he argues, forged within the opposition between radically different logics of power. Inagaki’s book offers a compelling account of the real life of empire in motion. A vital contribution to the burgeoning field of imperial legal history, it speaks well beyond narrow thematic categories, and is vital reading for anyone interested in the history of empire more broadly and the Indian subcontinent.“ (Jon Wilson, Professor, King’s College London, UK)
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Haruki Inagaki is Associate Professor at Aoyama Gakuin University, Japan, having previously studied at King’s College London, UK. His research focuses on the history of British colonial rule in India. He is also interested in the comparative history of British and Japanese empires.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: The Rule of Law and Emergency in Colonial India
Book Subtitle: Judicial Politics in the Early Nineteenth Century
Authors: Haruki Inagaki
Series Title: Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73663-7
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: History, History (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-73662-0Published: 10 October 2021
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-73665-1Published: 10 October 2022
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-73663-7Published: 09 October 2021
Series ISSN: 2635-1633
Series E-ISSN: 2635-1641
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XV, 182
Number of Illustrations: 1 b/w illustrations
Topics: Imperialism and Colonialism, Legal History, History of South Asia, Social History