The Human: 'Legal, all too Legal' - Esmeir's Juridical Humanity

The concept of the human has come to occupy a central place in international politics, which is reflected in scholarly works in the fields of political theory, international relations, and international law. The human rights revolution, humanitarian intervention, sans frontières humanitarianism, and 'crimes against humanity' inform discourses of global politics in an age disconcerted with the dilemmas of sovereignty that surface in the phenomena of fragile states and proliferating non-international armed conflicts. While diplomats and scholars debate 'human sovereignty,'¹ 'human security,'² and 'humanity's law,'³ critical commentators decry the neo-imperial thrust of practices of humanitarian intervention and of the activities of international courts and tribunals.⁴

Observers of contemporary world politics are thus confronted with an intricate constellation of the human, law, and empire. This constellation, however, is anything but peculiar to our times. Indeed, the mutual imbrication of law, imperialism, and the civilizing mission has fueled justifications of European colonialism since the early modern period.⁵ Samera Esmeir's Juridical Humanity. A Colonial History provides a detailed picture of the dynamics of this configuration during the British colonial rule in Egypt in the late 19^th and early 20^th century.

The work's major objects of inquiry are the legal reforms introduced by the British during their occupation of Egypt beginning in 1882. The major argument is that these colonial legal reforms claimed to deliver Egyptians from their inhuman existence under pre-colonial rule. Through meticulous archival research on British colonial law as promulgated and practiced, Esmeir excavates how the colonial administration rendered the human the telos of modern positive law. Methodologically, therefore, the work accomplishes an impressive synthesis between historical investigation and ingenious interpretations of political and social theory, engaging with the writings of Fanon, Arendt, Butler, Foucault, Derrida, Mauss, Bentham, and Latour, amongst others.

Esmeir brings these theoretical works to bear on the empirical subject matter by elaborating the nexus between modern law and the human in relation to history, nature, sovereign power, and violence. She begins by illuminating how the British legal reforms were inaugurated by the colonization of history (24). The concept of 'juridical humanity,' she argues, emerged within the historicist consciousness that the colonial law substituted for the Ottoman-khedival order. In order to deliver Egyptians from their not yet human existence, the new law relegated the past to a place unrelated to the present political moment. The allegedly 'humane' legal innovations thus launched targeted specific populations, namely prisoners, laborers, and peasants and sought to restructure their subjection to violence as well as their relationship to non-human forces, such as animals, insects, and the Nile.

Amongst the specific legal reforms discussed in the book is the prohibition of acts considered cruel against incarcerated criminals. Investigating prison reforms, Esmeir reveals the juridical human as a subject spared from types of suffering deemed arbitrary, excessive, and non-instrumental. British reformers detected such modes of suffering in Egyptian prisons and considered them to evidence the dehumanization of the incarcerated. In the same brushstroke, Esmeir shows how the new legal regulations gave rise to other types of violence and pain considered productive of the humanity of the criminal (110-112). Esmeir astutely observes human - non-human relations as the site of the humanization of Egyptians. Certain acts against animals, hitherto unexamined under Egyptian rule, came to be considered as cruel and to dehumanize the agent, all the while painful medical experiments on animals were justified by their contribution to curing human diseases (139-140). Accordingly, the author details how humanization by way of law involved the subjection of Egyptians to a legal regime dictating the domination of nature. Insects attacking Egyptian cotton fields, destined for producing profits on global markets, had to be battled systematically. In order to qualify as a properly human activity, Esmeir argues, labor had to render nature useful for the national economy. These engagements with nature required legislating specific forms of peasant labor, deviations from which...