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  • Law and the Spaces of EmpireIntroduction to the Special Issue
  • Nandini Chatterjee and Lakshmi Subramanian

This special issue is a reflection on the role of law in structuring the real and imagined spaces of empire. Recently, there has been a surge of interest in imperial history, motivated by the perceived need to recover the specific political, economic, social and psychological routes traversed by different portions of the world in the journey towards a globalized modernity.1 Within this trend, there has been a particularly vibrant interest in tracing the role of law, especially during the age of empires, when it assumed a very special role in producing new regimes and social structures, the marks and effects of which postcolonial societies continue to bear.2 This markedly inter-disciplinary interest in law and empire has demonstrated a high level of spatial awareness. Scholars from a number of disciplines have begun to think about empires as peculiarly structured spaces, bringing the insights and methodologies of historical geographers to work on non-traditional themes and material, one of these being legal pluralism, or the multiplicity of competing legal orders, all operational within the same jurisdiction.3 The diversity of approaches and conclusions in this growing and somewhat ill-defined area is obvious. Nonetheless, many seem to have arrived at the notion of empire as an inevitably multi-layered, porous and fractured space; a notion that does not discard the fact of colonial violence and the ideological aggression of imperialists, and indeed, builds upon them to displace a view of empires as territorially and ideologically stable and bounded units entailing predictable, if oppressive control of colonized populations by colonizers.4 In place of land-based empires with well-policed borders, clear laws and clean-cut bureaucracies, we now have borderlands and lumpy seascapes crisscrossed by corridors carved by trade, treaties and piracy. In place of the ideological surety of colonial “lawfare” and anti-colonial resistance,5 “jurisdictional jockeying” seems to be the forte of motley imperial legal actors.6 Such a vision has entailed, among other things, the awareness of alternative, non-metropolitan articulations of law, righteous order and justice, and the possibility that such articulations were convincing to many and effective in shaping the everyday empire. This collection of essays looks beyond pragmatic, situational “jockeying,” and also ad-hoc rationalization or “jurispractice,” towards recovering some of those alternative, non-dominant legal visions and the sources of their reasoning. In this way we seek to understand the legal spaces of empire from and through those alternative vantage points.

A number of historiographical trends have converged on this impromptu, and not always consciously shared, agenda of exploring the role of law in the structuration of imperial spaces. These include the obvious candidates of histoire croisée,7 trans-national histories,8 histories of mobile populations and diasporas and of legal efforts to regulate their movements and rights,9 histories of borderlands,10 histories of penal settlements,11 but also histories of imperial diplomacy and treaty-making,12 new histories of settler colonies,13 explorations of trans-continental constitutions,14 and studies of political or legal philosophers who pondered upon the fact and justifications of empire. All of these works point to law’s capacity for structuring human geographies, the scope that empire afforded to that power, and also to the contradictions that imperial rule generated.

Law, as we know, creates a very specific kind of space called jurisdiction—the area over which it has authority. This area is not necessarily territorial; it can be an arena of social interactions, such as commerce (mercantile law), war (military law), or religion (church law). Historians of political philosophy and jurisprudence have long been concerned with jurisdiction, as well as the source of its legitimacy—sovereignty. Since the Westphalian resolution in Europe, there has been a distinct contradiction between the claims of complete territorial sovereignty of national laws (defined against the claims of any universal empire or church), and the expansive ambitions of “secular” universal law (as natural law). Modern empires did not just complicate this territorial grid; they embodied its core contradiction. In its universalist mode, imperial law aspired to be global but not international since it...

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