Law and Colonialism

Abstract

Drawing selectively on histories of the British Empire, this chapter considers how scholars have conceived of law's role in colonial pursuits, how these themes have changed, and new directions that might be pursued further. It considers the ways in which studies of law and colonialism have characterized law as force, violence, and command. The chapter examines how scholars have reconceptualized law as a site of struggle, resistance, and subversion. It focuses on recent comparative and transnational scholarship on legal mobility and migration, a literature that seeks to transcend the binaries of colonizer/colonized, domination/resistance, and metropole/colony that have been the hallmark of postcolonial studies and have shaped and informed studies of law and colonialism. Legal migrations, from India via the Indian Penal Code, raise important substantive, conceptual, and methodological questions regarding the form, content, and force of law and the shared repertoires of colonial rule that its movements engendered.

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