The Rule of Law and Emergency in Colonial India

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xv

   PDF

2. Law and Emergency: Two Logics of Colonial Governance

   • Haruki Inagaki

   Pages 1-24

3. Reform Public and the King’s Court in Bombay City

   • Haruki Inagaki

   Pages 25-40

4. Summonses, Writs and Revenue Defaulters in the Mofussil

   • Haruki Inagaki

   Pages 41-63

5. Indirect Rule Threatened by Raiders, Princes and the King’s Court

   • Haruki Inagaki

   Pages 65-90

6. Habeas Corpus in Times of Emergency: The Bombay Dispute

   • Haruki Inagaki

   Pages 91-113

7. Bengal, Madras and Imperial Debate on Despotism

   • Haruki Inagaki

   Pages 115-136

8. Epilogue and Conclusion

   • Haruki Inagaki

   Pages 137-153

9. Back Matter

   Pages 155-182

   PDF

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.

• East India Company
• EIC
• Bombay
• British Empire
• Despotic rule
• Judicial politics
• Logic of law
• Logic of emergency
• Mountstuart Elphinstone
• William Bentinck
• Indian merchants
• Imperial politics

“Inagaki’s methodical study demonstrates how the Company’s disputes and eventual subjugation of the independent King’s Court in Bombay embedded the logic of state necessity and perpetual emergency into the governing fabric of the British colonial regime. In so doing, it offers a compelling and important new insight into how colonial rule privileged security and political order over the rule of law.” (Mark Condos, Lecturer, King’s College London, UK)
“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)

• Aoyama Gakuin University, Tokyo, Japan

  Haruki Inagaki

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.

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