A Colonial Legal Laboratory? Jurisprudential Innovation in British India

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Assaf Likhovski
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Forensic Science ◽  
Islamic Law ◽  
British India ◽  
New Ideas ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
English Law ◽  
English Textbooks ◽  
A Site ◽  
English Culture

Abstract In this Article, I examine jurisprudence textbooks and related works written in British India in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Some of the jurisprudential works from India were not merely summaries of the leading English books, but were different from English works in three senses. First, the gap between English theories and Indian legal realities led some authors to question key English notions about the nature and development of law. Second, some of the works produced in India were more influenced by Continental and American legal theories than the equivalent English textbooks. Sometimes this was due to the fact that the authors of these works had some Continental training, and sometimes the non-English influence reflected a wider anticolonial nationalist move away from English culture. Finally, the influence of nationalism also led some Indian legal scholars to create a unique genre of jurisprudential works: Texts that used Western jurisprudential theories to describe the main features of Hindu (and, to a lesser extent, also Islamic) law. These unique aspects of colonial jurisprudential works illustrate a broader phenomenon: the fact that legal scholars in imperial peripheries such as India were not always simply passive receivers of ideas produced at the center of empires, but in some cases created works containing interesting jurisprudential insights. The notion that India was a “legal laboratory” in which legal scholars experimented with new ideas has already been discussed in the literature, largely based on examples taken from the fields of legislation (the codification of English law in nineteenth-century India) or forensic science. This Article explores the extent to which India was also a site of jurisprudential innovation.

DELIGHTFUL COXCOMBS TO INDUSTRIOUS MEN: FASHIONABLE POLITICS IN CECIL AND PENDENNIS

2002 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 289-304 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claire Nicolay
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Upward Mobility ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Class A ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
A Site ◽  
Trade Office

THOMAS CARLYLE’S CONTEMPTUOUS DESCRIPTION of the dandy as “a Clothes-wearing Man, a Man whose trade, office, and existence consists in the wearing of Clothes” (313) has survived as the best-known definition of dandyism, which is generally equated with the foppery of eighteenth-century beaux and late nineteenth-century aesthetes. Actually, however, George Brummell (1778–1840), the primary architect of dandyism, developed not only a style of dress, but also a mode of behavior and style of wit that opposed ostentation. Brummell insisted that he was completely self-made, and his audacious self-transformation served as an example for both parvenus and dissatisfied nobles: the bourgeois might achieve upward mobility by distinguishing himself from his peers, and the noble could bolster his faltering status while retaining illusions of exclusivity. Aristocrats like Byron, Bulwer, and Wellington might effortlessly cultivate themselves and indulge their taste for luxury, while at the same time ambitious social climbers like Brummell, Disraeli, and Dickens might employ the codes of dandyism in order to establish places for themselves in the urban world. Thus, dandyism served as a nexus for the declining aristocratic elite and the rising middle class, a site where each was transformed by the dialectic interplay of aristocratic and individualistic ideals.

scholarly journals Sayyid Mumtaz Ali and ‘Huquq un-Niswan’: An Advocate of Women's Rights in Islam in the Late Nineteenth Century

1990 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 147-172 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gail Minault
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Women's Rights ◽  
Islamic Law ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Third Place ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Sometime in the late 1890s, Sayyid Mumtaz Ali visited Aligarh and happened to show Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan the manuscript of his treatise in defense of women's rights in Islamic law, Huquq un-Niswan. As he began to read it, Sir Sayyid looked shocked. He then opened it to a second place and his face turned red. As he read it at a third place, his hands started to tremble. Finally, he tore up the manuscript and threw it into the wastepaper basket. Fortunately, at that moment a servant arrived to announce lunch, and as Sir Sayyid left his office, Mumtaz Ali snatched his mutilated manuscript from the trash. He waited until after Sir Sayyid's death in 1898, however, to publish Huquq un-Niswan.

scholarly journals The Irish Céilí: A Site for Constructing, Experiencing, and Negotiating a Sense of Community and Identity

2011 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-60 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine E. Foley
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Sense Of Community ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Dance ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
A Site ◽  
Changing Role ◽  
Important Site

For over a hundred years the Irish céilí, as an ‘invented’ social dance event and mode of interaction, has played a significant and changing role. This paper examines the invention of this Irish dance event and how it has developed in Ireland throughout the twentieth century. From the Gaelic League's cultural nationalist, ideological agenda of the late nineteenth century, for a culturally unified Ireland, to the manifestation of a new cultural confidence in Ireland, from the 1970s, this paper explores how the céilí has provided an important site for the construction, experiencing and negotiation of different senses of community and identity.

Striving for a New Exegesis of the Qurʾān

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johanna Pink
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Media ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Structural Context ◽  
Nation States ◽  
New Ideas ◽  
Late Nineteenth

The article discusses Muslim attempts to develop innovative hermeneutical models for understanding the Qurʾān. It analyses the beginnings of reform in the eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries and the sustained efforts, starting in the late nineteenth century, to bring the interpretation of the Qur’an in line with ideas of rationalism and modernism. On this basis, the chapter presents an overview of the most important modern hermeneutical approaches to the Qur’an, some of which focus on its literary qualities, its historical context, its major themes, or its main goals, while others emphasize the Qurʾān’s inimitability in new ways or seek to expose its immediate relevance for contemporary believers. The development of these new ideas, which have often provoked severe criticism, is situated in the structural context of the emergence of colonial and nation states, mass alphabetization, and new media.

The Moghia Menace, or the Watch Over Watchmen In British India

2012 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 751-779 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANASTASIA PILIAVSKY
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Systemic Change ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
British India ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Indigenous Governance

AbstractThis paper contributes to the history of ‘criminal tribes’, policing and governance in British India. It focuses on one colonial experiment—the policing of Moghias, declared by British authorities to be ‘robbers by hereditary profession’—which was the immediate precursor of the first Criminal Tribes Act of 1871, but which so far altogether has passed under historians’ radar. I argue that at stake in the Moghia operations, as in most other colonial ‘criminal tribe’ initiatives, was neither the control of crime (as colonial officials claimed) nor the management of India's itinerant groups (as most historians argue), but the uprooting of the indigenous policing system. British presence on the subcontinent was punctuated with periodic panics over ‘extraordinary crime’, through which colonial authorities advanced their policing practices and propagated their way of governance. The leading crusader against this ‘crisis’ was the Thuggee and Dacoity Department, which was as instrumental in the ‘discovery’ of the ‘Moghia menace’ and ‘criminal tribes’ in the late nineteenth century as in the earlier suppression of the ‘cult of Thuggee’. As a policing initiative, the Moghia campaign failed consistently for more than two decades. Its failures, however, reveal that behind the façade-anxieties over ‘criminal castes’ and ‘crises of crime’ stood attempts at a systemic change of indigenous governance. The diplomatic slippages of the campaign also expose the fact that the indigenous rule by patronage persisted—and that the consolidation of the colonial state was far from complete—well into the late nineteenth century.

‘Business Culture’ and Entrepreneurship in British India, 1860–1950

2000 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 333-348 ◽  
Author(s):  
A.-M. Misra
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Business Culture ◽  
Large Firms ◽  
Eastern India ◽  
British India ◽  
Industrial Economy ◽  
Corporate Organization ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Trading Economy

In the late nineteenth century British expatriate enterprise enjoyed extraordinary success. A few large firms effectively dominated the external trading sector and the modern industrial economy of Eastern India. Based in Calcutta, these firms have been credited with the introduction into India not only of modern industry, but also of modern corporate organization. However, having reached a peak of dominance in the early 1900s, British enterprise seemed to lose its dynamism and became increasingly associated with the old and declining sectors of the Indian industrial and trading economy.

Native Foreigners and the Ambiguity of Order and Identity: The Case of African Diasporas and Islamic Law in British Cameroon

2012 ◽  
Vol 39 ◽  
pp. 97-122 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harmony S. O'Rourke
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Islamic Law ◽  
Civil Law ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Northern Nigeria ◽  
Muslim Population ◽  
Legal Regimes ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Colonial Government

Abstract:In 1947, the colonial government in British Cameroon established an Islamic court in the Grassfields to try cases involving the region's Muslim population, primarily comprised of Fulani and Hausa diaspora communities that had settled the area since the late nineteenth century. Colonial debates over the creation and purview of the court reveal uncertainties that permeated Indirect Rule's legal categories of native and non-native, or tribe and race, which were to be governed by customary and civil law, respectively. Comparing legal regimes in British Cameroon with Northern Nigeria, the homeland of “native” Hausa and Fulani, shows that Islamic law sat uneasily across the divide between customary and civil law. With the importation of the court to the Grassfields, where Fulani and Hausa transformed into “native foreigners,” the delineation between customary and civil law was rendered even more obscure, illustrating that it could never neatly correspond to constructions of race and tribe.

Literary and Historic Flâneuses: Observation, Commentary, Enterprise and Courage in Late-Nineteenth-Century Women’s Professional Lives

2019 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 380-397
Author(s):  
Leo Hall ◽  
Simon Grennan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Professional Lives ◽  
Comic Strips ◽  
Urban Modernity ◽  
Production And Distribution ◽  
New Ideas ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Abstract Discussions of the conception of that exemplar of late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth century urban modernity, the flâneur, have focused on both critique of the figure’s masculinity and more radical and nuanced conceptions of women’s flânerie. This article considers both the re-gendering and ungendering of flânerie in the character of three flâneuses in fiction published in the 1870s, 1880s and 1910s: Madame Sidonie, Henrietta Stackpole, and Elsie Bengough, and related dissonances and synergies in the career and work of London actress and cartoonist Marie Duval, active 1869–1885. It will argue that changes in types of reading supervened upon the boom in the production and distribution of serial publications during this period, resulting in the embodiment of new female professional identities, relative to both changing experiences of urban life and changing experiences of reading. The article makes a distinction between new ideas of these types of urban professional woman and the development of the identity of the New Woman after 1894. It examines the historic comprehensibility of the fictional flâneuses to readers of Zola, James, and Onions, according to the new opportunities and prohibitions that constituted the lived experiences of the developing urban entertainments industry of the period, in Duval’s comic strips and vignettes in the weekly London magazine Judy, or The London Serio-Comic Journal.

scholarly journals De nieuwe gids and its Informal Patronage System

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 53 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helleke Van den Braber
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Ideas ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Professional Writers ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Patronage System

This paper focuses on the funding and finances of <em>De nieuwe gids</em>, a late nineteenth-century periodical believed by many to be the archetypical Dutch cultural magazine. The editors of <em>De nieuwe gids</em> introduced new ways of running their business and had new ideas about their role as professional writers and painters, about the pitfalls of creating for money, and about the relationship between art and finance. The paper argues that they alleviated their uneasy relationship with money through different forms of patronage. The editors acquired a substantial capital from a consortium of eleven backers, and used this money for the continuation of the magazine as well as for the upkeep of those members of their group who had no other resources. They made sure that money was circulated and transferred in such a way that all members profited: artists without money could keep on writing and painting, and artists who did have money invested in the continuity of the group as a whole and in their own place within it. This patronage system was remarkably successful, probably because it did not affect the artistic prestige or credibility of the editors, nor of the benefactors involved.

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