Shaunnagh Dorsett – författare

This collection brings together an international group of scholars in order to provide new insights into the diversity of imperial legalities.

Across empires, legalities were produced not just – or even – through the imperial imposition of laws and legal forms, but through local processes of negotiation and contestation. Far from the metropoles, local actors found ways to creatively navigate and subvert imperial frameworks and laws and to create space in which to shape new legalities, responsive to local circumstance and need. Covering topics as diverse as smuggling in eighteenth century Jersey, the criminalisation of female market women in World War II-era southern Nigeria, and whiteness and race in ‘sexual perversion’ cases in twentieth-century Malaya, the collection elaborates new legal histories of empire. Drawing from Britain, Ireland, Australia, Canada, the USA, India, Sri Lanka, Africa and Malaysia, the collection brings together chapters that examine the stories of the peoples of empires and shows how they constituted, experienced, navigated and subverted the legal complexities of living under empire.

This book will be of interest to scholars and researchers in law and history, but also to those with relevant interests in post-colonial and cultural studies, as well as in criminology and sociology.

This collection brings together an international group of scholars in order to provide new insights into the diversity of imperial legalities.

Across empires, legalities were produced not just – or even – through the imperial imposition of laws and legal forms, but through local processes of negotiation and contestation. Far from the metropoles, local actors found ways to creatively navigate and subvert imperial frameworks and laws and to create space in which to shape new legalities, responsive to local circumstance and need. Covering topics as diverse as smuggling in eighteenth century Jersey, the criminalisation of female market women in World War II-era southern Nigeria, and whiteness and race in ‘sexual perversion’ cases in twentieth-century Malaya, the collection elaborates new legal histories of empire. Drawing from Britain, Ireland, Australia, Canada, the USA, India, Sri Lanka, Africa and Malaysia, the collection brings together chapters that examine the stories of the peoples of empires and shows how they constituted, experienced, navigated and subverted the legal complexities of living under empire.

This book will be of interest to scholars and researchers in law and history, but also to those with relevant interests in post-colonial and cultural studies, as well as in criminology and sociology.

This book takes its cue from the observation that jurisdiction - as the speech of law - articulates or proclaims law. Without jurisdiction the law would be speechless, without authority and authorisation. So too would be critics who approach the law or want to live lawfully. As a field of legal knowledge and legal practice, jurisdiction is concerned with the modes of authority and the manner of the authorisation of law. It encompasses the broadest questions of the authority and the founding of legal order as well as the minutest detail of the ordering of the business of the administration and adjudication of justice. It gives us both the point of articulation of law and the technological means of the expression of law. It gives us too, the understanding of the limits of the authority of law, as well as the resources for engaging with the plurality of laws, and the means of engaging in lawful behaviour. A critical approach to law through the forms of authority and action in law provides a means of engaging with the quality of relations created and maintained through law and a means of taking responsibility for the practices of jurisdiction (and what is done in the name of the law). This book provides a critical, and historically grounded, elaboration of the key themes of jurisdiction. It does so by offering students and scholars of law a form of critical engagement with the technologies, devices and forms of jurisdictional ordering. It shows how the common has authorised legal relations and bound persons, places, and events to the body of law. It offers a number of resources and engagements of jurisdiction on the basis that a jurisprudence of jurisdiction, if it is anything, engages forms of human relation.

This book takes its cue from the observation that jurisdiction - as the speech of law - articulates or proclaims law. Without jurisdiction the law would be speechless, without authority and authorisation. So too would be critics who approach the law or want to live lawfully. As a field of legal knowledge and legal practice, jurisdiction is concerned with the modes of authority and the manner of the authorisation of law. It encompasses the broadest questions of the authority and the founding of legal order as well as the minutest detail of the ordering of the business of the administration and adjudication of justice. It gives us both the point of articulation of law and the technological means of the expression of law. It gives us too, the understanding of the limits of the authority of law, as well as the resources for engaging with the plurality of laws, and the means of engaging in lawful behaviour. A critical approach to law through the forms of authority and action in law provides a means of engaging with the quality of relations created and maintained through law and a means of taking responsibility for the practices of jurisdiction (and what is done in the name of the law). This book provides a critical, and historically grounded, elaboration of the key themes of jurisdiction. It does so by offering students and scholars of law a form of critical engagement with the technologies, devices and forms of jurisdictional ordering. It shows how the common has authorised legal relations and bound persons, places, and events to the body of law. It offers a number of resources and engagements of jurisdiction on the basis that a jurisprudence of jurisdiction, if it is anything, engages forms of human relation.

This book is a major contribution to our understanding of the role played by law(s) in the British Empire. Using a variety of interdisciplinary approaches, the authors provide in-depth analyses which shine new light on the role of law in creating the people and places of the British Empire. Ranging from the United States, through Calcutta, across Australasia to the Gold Coast, these essays seek to investigate law’s central place in the British Empire, and the role of its agents in embedding British rule and culture in colonial territories.

One of the first collections to provide a sustained engagement with the legal histories of the British Empire, in particular beyond the settler colonies, this work aims to encourage further scholarship and new approaches to the writing of the histories of that Empire. Legal Histories of the British Empire: Laws, Engagements and Legacies will be of value not only to legal scholars and graduate students, but of interest to all of those who want to know more about the laws in and of the British Empire.