Legal Histories of the British Empire: Laws, Engagements and Legacies

ISBN-13: 9781138950870 / Angielski / Miękka / 2015 / 270 str.

Shaunnagh Dorsett; John McLaren

Opis

This book is a major contribution to our understanding of the role played by law(s) in the British Empire. Using a variety of interdisciplinary approaches, the authors provide in-depth analyses which shine new light on the role of law in creating the people and places of the British Empire. Ranging from the United States, through Calcutta, across Australasia to the Gold Coast, these essays seek to investigate law's central place in the British Empire, and the role of its agents in embedding British rule and culture in colonial territories. One of the first collections to provide a sustained engagement with the legal histories of the British Empire, in particular beyond the settler colonies, this work aims to encourage further scholarship and new approaches to the writing of the histories of that Empire. Legal Histories of the British Empire: Laws, Engagements and Legacies will be of value not only to legal scholars and graduate students, but of interest to all of those who want to know more about the laws in and of the British Empire.

Spis treści

Introduction: The New Legal Histories of Empire Part I – Framing Empire: People and Institutions  The Rule of Law and the Perils of Judicial Tenure in Britain’s Caribbean Colonies, 1800-1868  To Sit or not to Sit: The Debate over the Inclusion of Indigenous Judges in the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council  Cultural expertise and social vision: Justice Amir Ali’s interpretation of Indian tradition  A Judicial Maverick: John Gorrie at large in the Victorian Empire Part II – Laws  Benjamin Knowles v. Rex: Judging Murder, Race, and Respectability from Colonial Ghana to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, 1928-30  Inventing Extraordinary Criminality: A Study of Criminalization by the Calcutta Goondas Act  Burton’s Draft 1838 Act for the Amelioration of the Aboriginal Natives (NSW)  A Single Site for Modernising Nineteenth Century Law: India and the UK Part III – Engagements  "Empires, Law, and First Nations in Northern North America, 1500–1760  "Understanding "Chinese Customs": the Irish Judges and the Sinchew Disputes in the Straits Settlements, 1830s–1870s  Translating the Hedaya: Colonial Foundations of Islamic Law  Legacies of Empires: Race and Labor Contracts in the Upper Mississippi River Valley, 1808–1837 Part IV – Legacies  Slavery, Villeinage, and the Law in Imperial Britain  "Macaulay: Liberal Imperialist or Progressive Law Reformer? The India Penal Code and Labour  Mobilities of Law: Indigenous Specters and Indian Migration, 1914  A Slave Trade Jurisdiction: Attempts against the slave trade and the making of a space of rights in the Arabo-Persian Gulf, the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea (1820-1900)

O autorze

Shaunnagh Dorsett is Professor of Law at the University of Technology, Sydney. Her work focuses on Crown-Indigenous relations in colonial New South Wales / New Zealand and sovereignty formation in the first half of the nineteenth century.

John McLaren is Emeritus Professor of Law, University of Victoria, British Columbia. His research interests lie in the field of Canadian and Comparative Colonial Legal History. He has written widely and edited several books of essays in those fields.