Towards an Environmental History of Law
The concluding chapter brings together different aspects necessary for analysing the relationship between human action and nature in the process of perceiving, disputing and codifying rights in nature. It targets the many transformative visions for a particular landscape, the battle between interests pursuing different legal principles that underpinned the formation of codes, the influence of scholarly thought on legal debates and, finally, in a close empirical study, it focuses the trajectory of land conflicts during its most intense period until the first more encompassing code of rights in nature in the Nilgiris in 1843. Thematically, it discusses the importance of acknowledging the competing interests of individual absolute property and government sovereignty, and it points to the necessity to focus the process of making law in contrast to treating law as a given. A major emphasis is given to the specific characteristic of people’s resistance against colonial encroachments in a situation of multiple authority and internal divisions among the indigenous communities. Seen in terms of negotiation, it is a strategy of acknowledging, influencing and making use of the other party’s domain of authority—a strategy of keeping confrontation at a minimum level and making gains without open conflict. Land conflicts were characterised by multiple layers of authority. Thereby, it puts forward a complex and more nuanced situation of conflict and negotiation than the previously common binary of the colonial and the colonised. Both these domains were interspersed by conflicts and oppositions, and alliances cut across such imaginative divides. Lastly, the problem of defining regions of regional history is reassessed and revised against the north–south India divide as well as the analytical hill–valley polarisation. Thus four key arguments are derived from the study and brought into a discussion of an environmental history of law. As the study makes clear, the Nilgiris, in spite of being a small region in the hills, were a site where large even global issues were at stake.