A despotism of law : crime and justice in early colonial India

This volume deals with law-making as a cultural enterprise in which the colonial state had to draw upon existing normative codes of rank, status and gender, and re-order them to a new and more exclusive definition of the state's sovereign right. This book explores the emergence of colonial criminal law against the backdrop of the British conquest and pacification of north India. Criminal justice is examined as an ideological and cultural enterprise in which the East India Company sought to communicate new notions of sovereign right. Central to this enterprise was the claim that legitimate violence was the sole prerogative of the state, an assertion which brought colonial law into conflict with the competing claims of religious, patriarchal and patronal authority. Though the Company's judicial institutions manoeuvred around caste, rank and patriarchy, they also engaged with various projects of modernity to assert a more transcendent and undivided notion of sovereignty. Dr. Singha's book also investigates the shift in some of the presumptions underlying criminal trial, and various experiments in penal techniques This major scholarly work fills a large gap in the history of eighteenth-century India. It will interest historians as well as students of law, especially those interested in the legal, cultural and socio-political aspects of colonialism R Singha 1......Page 1 R Singha 2......Page 15 R signha 3......Page 33 R signha 4......Page 55 R Singha 5......Page 76 R Singha 6......Page 99 R Singha 7......Page 129 R singha 7.1......Page 133 R Singha 8......Page 157