Juridical Humanity: A colonial history by Samera Esmeir (review)

Samera Esmeir’s Juridical Humanity is a significant addition to the expanding literature on law, violence and colonialism. Focused on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Egypt and examining British reforms over animal welfare, women’s and prisoner’s rights, forced peasant labor and the eradication of cotton worms, Esmeir’s book places modern law at the heart of colonization. Like other scholars in the field, she rejects the assertion that colonialism destroyed and dehumanized while law regenerated and restored. Instead, Esmeir argues that in colonial Egypt, the human emerged as a juridical category, an effect and outcome of modern law that sought “to humanize Egyptians by declaring them subjects of the rule of law” (4). Although modern law was to replace the despotism and violence of coloniality, including violence associated with the Ottoman-Islamic legal tradition, Esmeir compellingly demonstrates that through the quest for humanity, modern law produced and justified its own violence. In colonial Egypt, legal violence was legitimized through its putative temperance, necessity, and erasure. “Modern positive law,” Esmeir contends, “colonized Egyptians by turning their humanity into law’s own teleology” (11).

Juridical Humanity opens an important set of questions on the life and afterlife of law and colonialism. Although Esmeir’s book centers on legal-humanitarian reforms in colonial Egypt, the questions she asks are equally relevant to other colonial and postcolonial contexts. What is the relationship between law, violence and the colonial? How have their historical intersections and entanglements instantiated a particular juridical figure of the human? In the contemporary moment, amidst the proliferation of global claims to human rights and ongoing threats of revolution, how does the human continue to inform political and legal struggles in postcolonial Egypt and beyond? Esmeir addresses these difficult questions by tracing the historical emergence of the human as a modern legal phenomenon. She demonstrates how juridical humanity has always been a technology of colonial rule, producing a relationship of subjection in which the (post)colonial subject of contemporary Egypt remains deeply inscribed (285).

The “human,” which lies at the center of Esmeir’s project, pivots on its constitutive relationships with the inhuman, and to a lesser extent, the nonhuman. The human, she argues, is “a concept/figure that stands for a specific species, a certain status, a particular form of life” (1). This species and status of the human, as Esmeir conceives it, is articulated dialectically. “The human,” she writes, “is not separate from the inhuman but is produced through law’s expulsion of the inhuman” (92). Moreover, nonhuman animals are “not the other of the human, rather, their presence facilitated the cultivation of the particular colonial humanity of Egyptians” (132). Throughout the book, the centrality and significance of the inhuman is clear. However, the status of the nonhuman is not as readily apparent. Indeed, in Juridical Humanity, there seems to be a curious slipperiness between the inhuman and nonhuman. It is not entirely clear how Esmeir conceptualizes their differentiations (if at all) or how their distinctions informed the juridical production of humanity, as both surely do. For this, we must turn briefly to Fanon.

Fanon is viewed as the anticolonial thinker who took the human/inhuman/nonhuman divides most seriously. He is also one of the few critics to offer productive and useful insights into their distinctions. In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon gestures to the discrete yet overlapping edges among the human/inhuman/nonhuman. “The native is declared insensible to ethics; he represents not only the absence of values, but also the negation of values. He is… the enemy of values… he is the absolute evil.”¹. The Native, in Fanon’s account, is vilified by the colonial regime as inhuman: cruel, barbaric and despotic. However, the Native is also dehumanized as nonhuman and is positioned alongside a long list of forces believed to comprise the domain of nature. “The Algerians, the veiled women, the palm trees and the camels” comprise the topography of the colonial. Nature, “obstinate and fundamentally rebellious,” Fanon writes, “is in fact represented in the colonies...