Law and Imperialism: Criminality and Constitution in Colonial India and Victorian England, and: Constructing the Criminal Tribe in Colonial India: Acting Like a Thief (review)

Law and Imperialism is a fascinating study of legal hierarchies in Britain and India. Preeti Nijar ranges widely across sociology, criminology, and history to discuss the close relationship between metropole and colony in the making of scientific typologies and social categories. Drawing on Homi Bhaba's idea of ambivalence, Nijar theorises this relationship as part of a deliberate effort to distance colonizer from colonized and to alleviate fears provoked by the proximity of the social other in Britain and in India. The place of scientific understandings is of special concern to her, in particular with respect to the supposed dangerousness of specific communities.

Though I greatly enjoyed this book, more engaged and critical editing would have greatly assisted Nijhar in producing a more forceful argument. Too often her prose is laboured, repetitive, and hard to follow. She presents a number of quotations without introduction or contextualisation. The footnotes are inconsistent; primary sources are included in the bibliography of secondary literature; and the author even misspells the name of one of the advisory editors of the book series. Conceptually, the book left me a little confused about the lines of distinction between race and ethnicity. Also, the history of the British Isles makes the concept of British indigeneity—repeatedly invoked by the author—deeply problematic. There are minor errors, too. She misunderstands the meaning of the word "outcast," following each citation with "sic." This completely misses its biblical associations, which are critical to understanding particular representations of the London poor. Nijhar is simply wrong, furthermore, about the history of convict transportation. She says that it was used in Britain before India, that Britain was unique in using it, and that convicts were used as indentured labor. But the East India Company transported Indian convicts overseas from the 1790s; Portugal, Spain, and France also transported convicts; and convicts were used as indentured labor only in the Americas, not in Australia. These criticisms aside, the general thrust of the book is timely and convincing, joining a growing academic literature on colonial networks and connectedness that includes Durba Ghosh and Dane Kennedy's Decentering Empire: Britain, India and the Transcolonial World (2006). In placing the so-called criminal Sansi tribe and the British criminal classes into a single frame of analysis through an evaluation of the 1871 Criminal Tribes Act in India and the 1869 Habitual Criminals Act in England, Nijhar is especially effective. She writes of the mutual exchange of ideas about dangerousness and race: "The 'criminal' tribes and castes of imperial India were legally and socially reified in ways not dissimilar to the 'dangerous' classes in Victorian England" (134).

Constructing the Criminal Tribe is a quite different sort of book, its analysis literary rather than historical or sociolegal. In Law and Imperialism, Nijhar places critical legal theory, criminal justice history, postcolonial theory, and criminology (especially labelling theory) within a single frame of historical analysis—albeit with the ultimate (though unexplored) aim of considering the historical constitution of aspects of postcolonial India. Henry Schwarz presents a narrower discussion of "the stigma of criminal inheritance" that impacts the denotified (ex-criminal) tribes in India today to more explicitly think through what I would call the colonial present (3). This is not a story of colonial and postcolonial crossings; it is instead about the explicit integration of history with the now, about the significance of colonialism for the Indian state, its institutions, its law, its governance, and its identity. Schwarz does not have to dig very deeply to find what he is looking for—the denotified tribe on which he mainly focuses (the Chhara) lives on the margins, and colonial discourses about criminality pervade contemporary social attitudes towards...