South Asia, the British Empire, and the rise of classical legal thought : toward a historical ontology of the law /
"The book considers the legal history of colonial rule in South Asia from 1757 to the early twentieth century. It charts a shift in the ontology by which notions and practices of sovereignty, land control, and adjudicatory rectification were aligned. This involved a transition from a formative...
| Main Author: | |
|---|---|
| Format: | eBook |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Oxford :
Oxford University Press,
[2024]
|
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | Connect to the full text of this electronic book |
| Summary: | "The book considers the legal history of colonial rule in South Asia from 1757 to the early twentieth century. It charts a shift in the ontology by which notions and practices of sovereignty, land control, and adjudicatory rectification were aligned. This involved a transition from a formative period under East India Company rule focusing on ‘the laws' more than ‘the law'. Underpinning the Company's ontology of ‘the laws' was an idea of absolute property that was translated into doctrinal terms as a duty of remitting rent more than any notionally physical dominion. Leaving property extrinsic to law, early colonial South Asia's ontology of the legal was put on a very different footing from the Anglo-common law mainstream. In South Asia it was only after Company rule gave way to Crown Raj that conditions ripened for ‘the law' to emerge as its own ostensibly irreducible institutional fact. As the book contends, among these conditions was the rise of what scholars have called classical legal thought. Even more than under the Company, then, under Crown rule there were two distinct forms of discourse through which the ontology of the legal was reconstituted around a globalizing notion of ‘the law' as an object in its own right. These are identified in terms of one variety of—doctrinal—discourse through which propositions of the law could be verbalized and that had qualities of ‘operativeness' and ‘administrability' and another variety—of ordinary language discourse—through which propositions about the law could be articulated"--Publisher's description. |
|---|---|
| Physical Description: | 1 online resource : maps |
| Audience: | Specialized. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references (pages 499-528) and index. |
| ISBN: | 9780198916512 0198916515 |