Law and Politics in British Colonial Thought Transpositions of Empire

by Dorsett, Shaunnagh; Hunter, Ian

• ISBN13: 9780230104556
• ISBN10: 023010455X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-10-15
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

With the exhaustion of postcolonial studies, and following the historical turn in studies of European imperialism, the time is ripe for a more sharply historical consideration of the role of European legal thought in processes of colonial governance. Rather than recycling general theories of the ideological role of law in European colonization, the contributions to this volume focus on the historical interaction between law and politics in British colonial contexts in order to clarify how European legal doctrines and institutions were actually transmitted, negotiated and modified in the concrete circumstances of frontier polities.

Author Biography

Shaunnagh Dorsett is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Technology, Sydney. She researches at the intersections of legal history, history of political thought, and jurisprudence. She has written extensively on colonial governance, including on sovereignty, jurisdiction, and the legal settlement of Australia and New Zealand. Ian Hunter is an Australian Professorial Fellow in the Center for the History of European Discourses at the University of Queensland. He is a leading scholar in the history of early modern political, religious, and philosophical thought.

Table of Contents

A Note on the Cover Image	p. vii
Acknowledgments	p. viii
List of Contributors	p. ix
Introduction	p. 1
European Law and Global Justice
Global Justice and Regional Metaphysics: On the Critical History of the Law of Nature and Nations	p. 11
Justice and Imperialism: On the Very Idea of a Universal Standard	p. 31
Transpositions of Empire
The Legalities of English Colonizing: Discourses of European Intrusion upon the Americas, c. 1490-1830	p. 51
The Uses of the Rule of Law in British Colonial Societies in the Nineteenth Century	p. 71
"Your Sovereign and Our Father": The Imperial Crown and the Idea of Legal-Ethnohistory	p. 91
The Justification of King Leopold II's Congo Enterprise by Sir Travers Twiss	p. 109
Frontiers of Justice
Samuel Marsden's Civility: The Transposition of Anglican Civil Authority to Australasia	p. 129
The Limits of Jurisdiction: Law, Governance, and Indigenous Peoples in Colonized Australia	p. 149
The Pig and the Peace: Transposing Order in Early Sydney	p. 169
William Pember Reeves (1857-1932): Lawyer-Politician, Historian, and "Rough Architect" of the New Zealand State	p. 187
The Crown in Colonial New Zealand
Sovereignty as Governance in the Early New Zealand Crown Colony Period	p. 209
Imperial Policy, Colonial Government, and Indigenous Testimony in South Australia and New Zealand in the 1840s	p. 229
Law and Politics in the Constitutional Delineation of Indigenous Property Rights in 1840s New Zealand	p. 249
Index	p. 269
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