International Conference
OCEAN OF LAW
Intermixed Legal Systems across
the Indian Ocean World, 1550-1950
7 Monday – 9 Wednesday
December 2015
Gravensteen 11
Leiden University
The Netherlands
Conveners
Mahmood Kooria MPhil
Sanne Ravensbergen MA
Advisory committee
Prof. Jos Gommans
Prof. Léon Buskens
Dr. Alicia Schrikker
Dr. Adriaan Bedner
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Contents
Introduction
4
Sponsors
6
Map
7
Locations and addresses
8
Programme Schedule
9
Keynote lectures
15
Abstracts and bios
18
E-mail addresses
58
Notes
59
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Introduction
Legal history in connection with the Indian Ocean world is
relatively a new field. Recent work by many scholars in this area
has added value to the cultural history of such regions as South,
Southeast and East Asia, and the Middle East and of the
workings of imperial and colonial structures. Interdisciplinary
research and cooperation of scholars working on early-modern
and modern history of the broader Indian Ocean world help trace
back the journeys of legal ideas and to reconstruct these legal
histories.
This conference will provide a platform for scholars to discuss
and share their work. We will address questions such as: how
were legal systems formed regionally through interactions? To
what extent did law play a role in the shaping of societal, multicultural or maritime settlements, and of empires and colonial
states in general? How did law function in the cosmopolitan
communities and how did the legal systems influence each other?
The existing historiographies on legal pluralism, spatialization
of law, movement of ideas, information networks, and cultural
brokerage serve as stepping stones for further discussions. The
main themes of the conference would be:


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Religious and secular laws: the construction,
generalization and/or homogenization of laws varying
from Christian, Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist to
Confucianist legal notions against/with the ‘secular’
laws.
Colonial and non-colonial laws: colonial legal
discourses and the saving/reforming enterprise of noncolonial laws.
Legal institutions: continuities, discontinuities and
ruptures in differently functioning (pluralistic) legal
institutions and their organizations.
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
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Micro and macro legal systems: macro legal theories’
regional functionality, micro legal practices’
negotiations with the broader systems.
Relationships between theory and practice of law: texts
and juridical manuals in practice, the exclusions and
inclusions, selections and deletions.
We have received a good number fascinating papers dealing
with the cultural mechanisms of law in the Indian Ocean world.
We aim this conference to be an interdisciplinary platform as we
already have contributions from historians, anthropologists,
legal scholars and others whose research is related to the legal
aspects of this oceanic rim. In the following days, we hope to
have intensive discussions on the connections and comparisons
in legal cultures across different regions, time-periods and
themes.
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Sponsors
The conference is generously sponsored by:
Leiden University Institute for History
Itinerario: International Journal on the History of European
Expansion and Global Interaction
Asian Modernities and Traditions, Leiden
Leiden University Fund
Leiden University Centre for the Study of Islam and Society
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Locations and Addresses
Conference Venue
Gravensteen 011
Pieterskerkhof 6
2311 SR Leiden
Leiden Special Collections
University Library
Witte Singel 27
2311 BG Leiden
Lunches:
Huizinga Building (History Department)
Doelensteeg 16
2311 VL Leiden
Dinner:
Het Koetshuis de Burcht
Burgsteeg 13
2312 JR LEIDEN
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Programme Schedule
Day 1: 07 December, 2015 (Gravensteen Building 011)
8.30 Registration and coffee
9.00-9.10 Welcome
9.10-10.30 Keynote Speech I: Prof. Paul Halliday (University
of Virginia)
Longing for Certainty, Across Law’s Oceans
10.30-10.45 Coffee
10.45 – 12.15 Panel 1
Chair: Prof. Nira Wickramasinghe (Leiden University Institute
for Area Studies)
Nurfadzilah Yahaya PhD (National University of Singapore)
Powers that Bind: Tracing the Impact of Powers of
Attorney in the Indian Ocean from 1880-1970
Joel Blecher PhD (Washington and Lee University)
From Mamluk Egypt to British India: Recasting Islamic
Penal Law in Colonial South Asia
Mahmood Kooria MPhil (Leiden University)
Arabic al-Muḥarrar, Dutch Mogharaer and Javanese
compendium: VOC’s experiments with Muslim law
12.15 – 13.30 Lunch (Huizinga Building)
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13.30 – 15.00 Panel 2
Chair: Prof. Jos Gommans (Leiden University Institute for
History)
Fachrizal A. Halim PhD (University of Saskatchewan)
The Formation of the Shāfiʿī school of law revisited: A
study of prosopography and fiqh works
Stewart Motha PhD (University of London)
Liminal Legality: Provincializing Contemporary Legal
Thought
Gijs Kruijtzer PhD (Vienna University)
Equivalence Encountered: Christians and Muslims in
the Face of Divine Law 1500-1700.
15.00-15.15 Coffee
15.15- 16.45 Panel 3
Chair: Prof. Petra Sijpesteijn (Leiden University Centre for
Islam and Society)
Sanne Ravensbergen MA (Leiden University)
Anchors of Colonial Rule: Pluralistic Legal Courts and
Criminal Justice in Colonial Java 1803-1848
Nikitas Hatzimihail PhD (University of Cyprus)
The Indian Ocean in the Mediterranean Sea: law reform
and Indian transplants in British colonial Cyprus
Elizabeth Lhost MPhil (University of Chicago)
The Qaẓī of Bharūch and the Changing Tides of Islamic
Law in South Asia, c. 1835–1880
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Day 2: 08 December, 2015 (Gravensteen Building 011)
08.30-08.45 Coffee
08.45-10.00 Keynote Speech II: Prof. Engseng Ho (Duke
University and National University of Singapore)
Islam across Cultures in the Indian Ocean: Legal,
Mystical and Mythological Faces
10.00-11.30 Panel 4
Chair: Prof. Manon van der Heijden (Institute for History)
Kirsty Walker PhD (Harvard University)
Policing Intimacy: Khalwat and the Everyday Life of
Islamic Law in British Malaya
Nathan Perl-Rosenthal PhD (University of Southern California)
The Osterley: Law, community and the sea in French
Mauritius (ca. 1779-1780)
Nadeera Rupesinghe MPhil (Leiden University)
Navigating Pluralities: Colonial Lawmaking in
Eighteenth-century Galle
11.30-11.45 Coffee
11.45-12.45 Panel 5
Chair: Prof. Egbert Koops (Leiden University, Law Faculty)
Arthur Weststeijn PhD (Koninklijk Nederlands Instituut te
Rome)
Provincializing Grotius. International Law and Empire
in a Seventeenth-Century Malay Mirror
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Stephanie Jones PhD (University of Southampton)
General histories and piratical geographies: the Indian
Ocean as a cultural formation of justice
12.45-14.00 Lunch (Huizinga Building)
14.00 - 15.30 Panel 6
Chair: Dr. Adriaan Bedner (Van Vollenhoven Institute, Leiden)
Renisa Mawani PhD (University of British Columbia)
Imperial Circuits of Law: The Case of Gurdit Singh
(1859-1954)
Byapti Sur MA (Leiden University)
Local Agency in the Dutch East India Company’s
Power-politics for Combatting Corruption in Bengal,
1684-1688
Guo-Quan Seng PhD (University of Chicago)
Dutch and Chinese Patrimonial Legal Discourse and the
Domestication of Women’s Commerce in Colonial Java
(1830s-1890s)
15.30-15.45 Coffee
16.00 – 17.00 Visit to the Special Collections, University
Library
19.00 Dinner at ‘Koetshuis de Burcht’ (Speakers and chairs
only)
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Day 3: 09 December, 2015 (Gravensteen Building 011)
08.30-08.45 Coffee
08.45-10.15 Panel 7
Chair: Esther Zwinkels MA (Leiden University Institute for
History)
Prof. Léon Buskens (Leiden University)
Constructing a colonial Shāfiʿī law canon in Indonesia
Santhosh Abraham PhD and Visakh Madhusoodanan Subha MA
(Indian Institute of Technology Madras)
Recasting and Reimagining the Islamic Law and
Jurisprudence: Colonial and Post-colonial Discourses
on Muslim Law in Malabar, Kerala
Hassan S. Khalilieh PhD (University of Haifa)
The Holy Qur’ān, the Prophet, and the Islamic Genesis
of the Free Sea
10.15-10.30 Coffee
10.30 – 12.00 Panel 8
Chair: Dr. Alicia Schrikker (Leiden University Institute for
History)
Fahad Bishara PhD (College of William and Mary)
Dhows, Empire, and International Law: “Law Talk”
and the Muscat Dhows Case, 1890-1905
Naveen Kanalu MPhil (University of California, Los Angeles)
Governing, Decreeing and Administering Political
Authority: Encountering Persiante Styles in the Legal
Cultures of the Early Modern Deccan
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Seán Donlan PhD (University of Limerick) and Mathilda
Twomey PhD (Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the
Republic of Seychelles)
Island, Intersection, or In-Between? Legal Hybridity
and Diffusion in the Seychellois Legal Tradition
12.00 – 13.15 Lunch (Huizinga Building)
13.15-14.15 Roundtable
Moderator: Dr. Carolien Stolte (Leiden University; Managing
Editor, Itinerario)
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Keynote lectures
Prof. Paul Halliday (University of Virginia) Longing for
Certainty, Across Law’s Oceans
Legal historians have long been ‘realists', countering the claims
of ‘formalists'. Our impulse, especially in recent decades, has
been to write histories of law that focus on those in positions of
weakness who used law in surprising ways, or on those who
were subjected to law's most vicious possibilities. Realist
accounts of law’s pluralities help explain both of these
experiences. But for all the importance of socially- and
culturally-informed understandings of law in complex crosscultural interactions, legal formalism has to be taken seriously.
After all, many in the past took formalism seriously—none more
so, perhaps, than justices in imperial superior courts. Such courts
were created across the Indian Ocean, and other oceans, too, in
the century after 1763. In the face of law’s unavoidable
pluralities, English judges in imperial courts longed for certainty.
Why, and with what consequences? The answers connect
legalities across the Indian Ocean and other oceans beyond.
Reading:
Paul Halliday, “"Laws’ Histories: Pluralisms, pluralities,
diversity” in Lauren Benton and Richard J. Ross, eds., Legal
Pluralism and Empire, 1500-1850 (New York University Press,
2013), 261-77.
Paul Halliday is Julian Bishko professor of history and chair of
the University’s Corcoran Department of History. He writes
about the legal history of Britain and its empire from the 16th to
19th centuries. His most recent book, Habeas Corpus: From
England to Empire, was published by Harvard University Press
in 2010 and won the 2011 Inner Temple Book Prize. He
frequently consults in the writing of briefs submitted to the U.S.
Supreme Court on issues connected to English legal history.
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Halliday's research has been supported by fellowships from the
American Council of Learned Societies, the National
Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, and the
American Philosophical Society. He is now working on two
research projects: one exploring the archival and other material
forms of judicial authority in the 18th century and the other
concerned with the formation of the imperial constitution, and in
particular, with the judicial role in the making of empire.
Through all his work runs a persistent interest in rethinking
English law’s history and the use of that history in U.S. courts,
as well as an interest in the relationship of English law to other
legal regimes around the globe.
Prof. Engseng Ho (Duke University and National University of
Singapore) Islam across Cultures in the Indian Ocean: Legal,
Mystical and Mythological Faces
Across the Indian Ocean, new societies, cultures and polities
have been created and recreated by the constant mobility of
people to places across cultures. Accounts of cross-cultural
encounters -- the founding of settlements, coming of foreigners,
and creation of sovereignties -- are widespread, and take many
narrative forms, including mystical, mythological and legal ones.
What changes in the movement from one genre form to another?
What consequences do these changes have for the meanings and
markings of lines of distinction and inclusion between persons
and communities? This lecture places law next to other faces of
Islam across cultures in the Indian Ocean.
Readings:
Engseng Ho, “Mobile Law and Thick Transregionalism” Law
and History Review 32: 04 (2014): 883-889
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Fahad Bishara, “Paper Routes: Inscribing Islamic Law across the
Nineteenth-Century Western Indian Ocean” Law and History
Review 32: 04 (2014): 797-820.
Engseng Ho is professor of cultural anthropology and history at
Duke University and Muhammad Alagil Distinguished Visiting
Professor at National University of Singapore. He was
previously Professor of Anthropology at Harvard University and
Senior Scholar at the Harvard Academy. After graduating from
Stanford with undergraduate degrees in economics and
anthropology, Ho spent a few years as an international
economist in Singapore before pursuing a masters and PhD at
the University of Chicago. His dissertation on a society of
Yemeni people that had a 500-year history of migration broke
the mold of a traditional anthropology program that focuses on
the study of contemporary society in one geographic locality. He
spent two years in Yemen conducting research that revealed a
rich history of a people who traveled throughout East Africa, the
Arab world, India and Southeast Asia, intermarrying and
contributing to the establishment of new Muslim religious,
political and legal institutions. The dissertation grew into a book:
The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian
Ocean (University of California Press, 2006). He is currently
interested in the international and transcultural dimensions of
Islamic society across the Indian Ocean, and its relations to
western empires. Ho also has conducted research in Saudi
Arabia, India, and Southeast Asia.
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Abstracts and bios
Nurfadzilah Yahaya (National University of Singapore):
“Powers that Bind: Tracing the Impact of Powers of
Attorney in the Indian Ocean from 1880-1970”
This paper explores the role of the Power of Attorney and its
closest Dutch equivalent known as the volmacht (plural:
volmachten) more accurately translated as ‘mandate’ or ‘act of
proxy’. Both the Power of Attorney and the volmacht were legal
devices that transferred power to someone to act on someone
else's behalf in a legal or business matter. These legal devices
were heavily utilized by Arab merchants from Hadhramaut (in
present-day Yemen) in order to authorize their representatives in
the British Straits Settlements (Penang, Malacca and Singapore)
and Netherlands Indies (Indonesia). Often conceived according
to Islamic law, but administered according to British or Dutch
legal procedures, these Powers of Attorney demonstrated how
Arab migrants negotiated at least two very different legal
systems to construct durable trust networks across the Indian
Ocean. Originally written in Arabic, the Powers of Attorney
were subsequently translated into Malay, and then further
translated into English or Dutch. Court cases involving Powers
of Attorney and volmachten illustrated common complications
presented by these documents namely, jurisdictional
complications, limitation of written documents as valid evidence
in Islamic law, the uncertainty surrounding women’s agency in
Islamic jurisdictions, translation problems and the complications
of multiple versions of same documents competing for legal
recognition. Heavy reliance on this particular legal device by
members of the Arab diaspora firmly tied them to state legal
institutions that authorized, ratified and enforced legal terms in
these documents. In their desire for legal enforcement, members
of the Arab diaspora entrenched themselves within political and
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economic hierarchies of formal legal colonial systems. These
Powers of Attorney offer a window into the logistics of
commercial operations across lands not ruled by a unified state
or integrated by a common currency. The uniformity of style of
these Powers of Attorney could be a testament to a truly global
mercantile culture.
Nurfadzilah Yahaya is a legal historian, and a Research Fellow
at Asia Research Institute at the National University of
Singapore. She is also the Regional Editor for SHARIAsource
for Southeast Asia, a go-to site on Islamic law for researchers,
journalists, and policymakers. From 2012 till 2015, she held the
Mark Steinberg Weil Early Career Fellowship in Islamic Studies
at Washington University in St. Louis. She received her PhD in
History from Princeton University in November 2012. She is
currently preparing her book manuscript on mobile Muslim
merchants in the Indian Ocean which is based on her doctoral
dissertation which won a Book Prize from the Al-Wehdah Arab
Association of Singapore in 2015. The book, tentatively
titled Fluid Jurisdictions,explores how members of the Arab
diaspora utilized Islamic law in British and Dutch colonial
courts of Southeast Asia.
Joel Blecher (Washington and Lee University): From Mamluk
Egypt to British India: Recasting Islamic Penal Law in
Colonial South Asia
The Islamic legal tradition’s transmission across the Indian
Ocean was as much about preserving the past as it was about
addressing the needs of the present time and place. As a case
study, this paper shows how Islamic religious authorities in
colonial India repurposed Mamluk-era Islamic legal
commentaries on discretionary punishment (taʿzīr) to address a
pressing question of their place and time: what were the proper
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limits of Muslim jurists’ authority in light of the growing
obsolescence of traditional institutions of Islamic law?
In in the midst of British colonialism in 19th-century South Asia,
a diverse landscape of traditionalist and modernist Islamic
reform movements emerged. The Ahl-i Hadith movement in
Bhopal and the Ḥanafī scholars at the Dar al-ʿUlūm in Deoband
navigated this landscape by circulating and composing supercommentaries on 14th- and 15thcentury Egyptian Islamic legal
texts in Arabic. That both reform movements claimed to base
their own commentaries on the works of luminary legal scholars
in late Mamluk-era Egypt did not prevent stark disagreements in
their approach to Islamic law and its derivation in the colonial
period.
One point of intersection that lays bare the divergent strategies
of the Ahl-i Hadith and scholars of Deoband is the chapter on
discretionary punishment (taʿzīr) in Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī, a
foundational source of the Islamic legal curriculum. Islamic laws
regulating corporal punishment had come under fierce criticism
by British observers, and South Asian Muslim legal scholars
found themselves locked in internal debates about how best to
respond. In cases of offenses requiring taʿzīr, were judges
limited by authenticated hadiths that restricted penalties to “no
more than ten lashes,” as the Ahl-i Hadith maintained? Or
should they defer to the opinions of their traditional legal school
that gave judges far broader powers in sentencing, as the
Deobandis argued? Building on the work of legal anthropologist
Brinkley Messick and social historian Muhammad Qasim
Zaman, this paper draws on Arabic, Urdu and English sources to
show how reformist scholars revised, edited, recompiled,
omitted, and elaborated upon the Islamic legal traditions they
inherited from Mamluk Egypt in diverse ways to speak to an age
in which traditional institutions of law were suffering
unprecedented criticism from within and from without.
This paper further reflects on what direct influence either of
these schools had in implementing or shaping the state
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judiciary’s position on corporal punishment. Ṣiddīq Ḥasan Khān
(d. 1890), the principal figure behind the Ahl-i Hadith, may have
enjoyed some executive power through his marriage to Shāh
Jahān Begum (r. 1847-1868). Despite the fact that British
authorities marginalized Ḥasan Khān’s views by likening them
unfavorably to those of the Wahhabis, his opinion that jurists’
authority in cases of discretionary punishment ought to be
strictly limited was ironically in consonance with those of most
British legal observers. Meanwhile, Anwar Shah al-Kashmīrī (d.
1933), a leading figure in the Deobandi school, had relatively
limited political power, serving as an educator in a madrasa
setting whose patrons were merchants of Gujarat and the South
Asian diaspora in South Africa. Kashmīrī’s views on
discretionary punishment, which strongly asserted the privilege
of traditionally trained experts, should be read in the context of a
new socio-political context in which secular educational
institutions, under the direct influence of the British, were
allowing Indian Muslims to re-encounter the Islamic legal
sources without the help of traditional Muslim authorities.
Joel Blecher (Ph.D. Princeton) is Assistant Professor of
Religion and Adjunct Professor of Law at Washington and Lee
University in Lexington, Virginia. His current research tracks
the social and intellectual history of the hadith commentary
tradition as it migrated from classical Andalusia, to postclassical Egypt, to modern India. His recent work on hadith
commentary has been published in Oriens.
Mahmood Kooria (Leiden University): Arabic al-Muḥarrar,
Dutch Mogharaer and Javanese compendium: VOC’s
experiments with Muslim law
Not many scholars have worked on the circulation of Islamic
legal texts and ideas across the Indian Ocean world. In my
doctoral dissertation, I look into the movement of Shāfiʿīte legal
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texts between eastern Mediterranean and Indian Ocean rims. I
focus on a particular text called Minhāj al-ṭālibīn by Yahya bin
Sharaf al-Nawawī (d. 1277), and by extension a few more other
texts. I argue that Minhāj became a turning point in the textual
history of Shāfiʿīsm eventually forming a textual longue durée
across different nodal points of the Indian Ocean world from
South-and East Africa to Southeast Asia. In this paper, I focus
on the base-text and intellectual predecessor of Minhāj called alMuḥarrar, written by ʿAbd al-Karīm bin Abī Saʿīd Muhammad
al-Rāfiʿī (d. 1226). This text is claimed to have been utilized by
the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oostindische
Compagnie, VOC) in the eighteenth-century while it was
formulating an “indigenous” legal code to administer its
Javanese subjects. I examine to what extent this claim is true;
why did the imperial power end up at this particular text while
there were a plenty others in the Islamic (Sunni-Shāfiʿīte) world;
and, how did this “authentic” Islamic legal corpus played a role
of colonial agent for the European imperial networks in a
Javanese atmosphere? Since the mid-seventeenth century, the
VOC officials have been encountering local legal cultures of
Indonesia. But they preferred to circumvent those in favour of
European laws whenever it was possible. In the eighteenth
century, however, they had to address indigenous legal systems
more directly when VOC was seeking out the possibilities of
direct or indirect rules. It sequenced to the production of many
codes directed towards the legal varieties of Muslim or Chinese
subjects of Indonesia. While some officers went on identifying
or codifying pure customary laws, some collected the Javanese
legal variants, a few others endeavoured to bring out compendia
of Islamic law consulting the fuqahā. The last group is said to
have consulted Shāfiʿīte legal texts with the help of local
scholars in the course of their codifications, and al-Muḥarrar
was their major reference. I argue that this assertion is baseless. I
also try to demonstrate that the very claim is part of a larger
colonial project that sought legitimacy from the indigenous
subjects at a time of political and economic crises.
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Mahmood Kooria is a doctoral candidate at the Leiden
University Institute for History since 2012. He received his M.A.
and M.Phil. in History from the Centre for Historical Studies,
Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.
Fachrizal A. Halim (University of Saskatchewan): The
Formation of the Shāfiʿī school of law revisited: A study of
prosopography and fiqh works
The formation of the Islamic schools of law has been the subject
of scholarly investigation since the establishment of modern
Islamic Studies in Western academia. In his famous Selected
Works, C. Snouck Hurgronje (1957) argued that before the
establishment of the schools of law, legal traditions were
grouped in loose geographical terms and that al-Shāfiʿī and
eponyms of other schools were singled out as representatives of
the infallible will of the community. Likewise, in his classic The
Ẓāhirīs, Ignaz Goldziher argued that al-Shāfiʿī was the most
important figure who introduced a legal paradigm that later
became the characteristic of each schools of law. Later
generations of scholars, such as Joseph Schacht (1964) and
George Makdisi (1981), further developed this theory, which
perpetuated the images of the great scholars such as al-Shāfiʿī,
Abū Ḥanifa and Mālik as the founders of the schools of law.
Serious challenges to this theory only appeared in Wael B.
Hallaq’s work (1993) in which he argued that even if eponyms
of the schools were great jurists, they did not always command
loyalty from their followers. In a similar vein, Christopher
Melchert (1997) opined that the great jurists were recognized as
the founders of the schools only after the proliferation of writing
activity that began far beyond the lifetime of these jurists.
Adding to the findings of Hallaq and Melchert, I offer a new
detailed formation of the Shāfiʿī school by highlighting the
existence of sub-schools or community of interpretations among
Shāfiʿī jurists. My paper promises to unravel the emergence of
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these sub-schools, their members, and how they were
synthesized by a later jurist, Yaḥyā b. Sharaf al-Nawawī (d.
676/1277). By reading al-Nawawī’s works and biographical
dictionaries of Shāfiʿī jurists, I argue that the Shāfiʿī school may
have been fully canonized only in the seventh/thirteenth century.
Dr. Fachrizal Halim is a lecturer of Islamic Studies at the
Department of Linguistics and Religious Studies, the University
of Saskatchewan. He received his doctoral degree from McGill
University Institute of Islamic Studies in 2013. Before coming to
Saskatchewan, he was a visiting fellow at the Islamic Legal
Studies Program (ILSP), Harvard Law School. His areas of
specialization are Islamic legal and intellectual tradition of
Muslims in the Middle East and Southeast Asia, Muslim
societies’ interaction with European colonialism, ChristianMuslim relations, and digital history of Islamic law. His
publications include Legal Authority in Premodern Islam: Yaḥyā
b. Sharaf al-Nawawī in the Shāfiʿī School of law (Routledge,
2015).
Stewart Motha (University of London): Liminal Legality:
Provincializing Contemporary Legal Thought
To be sovereign is to be alone at the moment of decision.
Apparently nothing mediates the novelty, creativity, and
singularity of the sovereign event. On this Schmittian account,
the sovereign is an island. And yet, the sovereign decision is in
need of an alibi. While the sovereign decision can create its own
frame of reference, it never proceeds on the basis that
arbitrariness is valid. Sovereignty, like art and fiction, moves by
way of a parergon. It is framed by an archive that is its mode of
legitimation. Among these archival and parergonal forms are a
range of literary figures, such as Crusoe and Friday, that appear
and reappear in juridical formulations.
This paper gives an account of what sustains and undoes the
enisled sovereign. Despite the claims to autonomy and
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monopoly of the decision, I argue that the sovereign cannot be
(a) castaway - cannot be alone being alone. The enisled
sovereign, like Robinson Crusoe on his island, wrestles with the
beast as savage other, and the beast that is within himself. The
discussion will focus on the Chagos Archipelago.
Stewart Motha is Reader in Law at Birkbeck Law School,
University of London. He is a critical legal theorist working on
sovereignty, violence, and aesthetics. His current research is
focused on the Indian Ocean region – including Australia, the
Chagos Islands, Sri Lanka, migration and refugees, and South
African post-apartheid jurisprudence. He is currently working on
a book, Archiving Sovereignty (forthcoming with Michigan
University Press).
Gijs
Kruijtzer
(Vienna
University):
Equivalence
Encountered: Christians and Muslims in the Face of Divine
Law 1500-1700.
When Europeans arrived in the Indian Ocean World through the
Cape Route, they did not enter an altogether unfamiliar world.
Islam and Muslims in particular were seen as nodes of
familiarity. Not only had southern Europe long had direct
contact with the Islamic world, there was also a shared heritage
that predated that contact. As Sanjay Subrahmanyam has pointed
out, the inheritance of ancient Greek philosophy and Alexander
legends combined with west Asian monotheism formed the basis
of some shared expectations between the Tagus and the Ganges
in the early modern period. John Tolan, moreover, points to
parallel developments in Latin and Arabic concepts of “religion”
and “law,” which led to their overlapping in crucial ways in both
cases.
In their search for the familiar and equivalent, which they
needed to explain the Indian Ocean World to themselves and
their audiences, European merchants and travellers thus often
presented Islamic law in terms of The Law, that is the Old
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Testament. Sometimes Islamic law was also explicitly presented
as comprehensible through the lens of Judaism already in this
period, though that became more common in the nineteenth
century. But what I want to stress here is the search for
equivalence that Post-Orientalist scholars so often overlook.
Moreover, the partly recognised shared background gave rise to
a common understanding of what constituted abidance by and
transgression of divine law. Europeans were able to point out the
strictness, laxity or hypocrisy of Muslims in following divine
law precisely because they understood so well the mechanisms
through which strategies of circumvention and exception
operated in Europe. Europeans asked themselves and their
interlocutors the question: how can people be conscious that x is
forbidden and still go ahead regardless? Which leads us to the
question: how can instances of this approach in the sources
contribute to our understanding of legal consciousness in the
western Indian Ocean region?
Gijs Kruijtzer is a historian of the early modern period with an
eye for visual culture, legal history and global comparison. He
studied history at Leiden University, Delhi University and the
University of Arizona, and has been a research associate at the
Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, Yale University and
Humboldt University. His publications include Xenophobia in
Seventeenth-Century India (2009), “Pomp before Disgrace: A
Dutchman Commissions Two Golconda Miniatures on the Eve
of the Mughal Conquest” (2010), and “The Fighting on the
Wall: Deccan Animal Symbolism in a Eurasian Perspective”
(2014). He is currently engaged in a project comparing the early
modern Persianate and Latinate worlds, hosted by the WISO
institute of the University of Vienna. The resulting book looks at
how some people in these two areas tried to generate acceptance
for instances of transgression of divine law.
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Elizabeth Lhost (University of Chicago): The Qaẓī of
Bharūch and the Changing Tides of Islamic Law in South
Asia, c. 1835–1880
When qazi (qāḍī) Syed Ahmad Husain wrote to the Governor in
Council of Bombay in 1842 asking for the restoration of his
annual Eid tribute, he appealed on the basis of more than his
judicial function. Emphasizing his family’s long-standing
history with the East India Company, the qazi stressed his
continued importance as an intermediary and promoter of
Company interests in his hometown of Bharūch (Broach)—a
port city in western Gujarat.
Indeed, as the qazi’s
correspondence with Company officials demonstrates, he helped
in more than one way to extend the reach of British authority
from the administrative hub of Bombay to his native entrepôt.
Drawing upon his correspondence with the Company as well as
records produced and maintained by the qazi and his nā’ib
(deputy; assistant), this paper examines the work of the qazi at
the time of the Company’s rapid expansion along the western
coast of India.
Granted authority under Islamic law and confirmed by the law
codes of the East India Company (specifically, the Bombay
Code of 1827), the qazi of Bharuch played a significant role in
promoting and maintaining order at a time of expanding British
dominance and increasing interference in the management of
everyday life. At the same time, as a pinnacle of the community
in Bharuch, the qazi also performed functions central to the
city’s commercial, social, and legal activities. Moving between
petitions and papers he sent to Company officials and the local
records and registers he kept, this paper considers the qazi’s
service in extending the authoritative reach of Company law
while also creating an environment of contractual stability and
consistency within the maritime world of western India.
Taking a cue from recent work by Fahad Ahmad Bishara and
others, I consider the way in which the legality and locality of
the qazi’s register provided a foundation for commercial activity
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in this well-established port city, not through their circulation
but rather in their capacity to document and preserve social
relations in the face of increasing mobility. In particular, by
recording marital transactions and solemnizing social
relationships, the qazi’s register provided an anchor for
Bharuch’s mobile commercial communities, including elites as
well as low-level sailors and laborers. More specifically, a
review of these records suggests that contracts of marriage often
served as a way to wed commercial interests; the qazi’s register
created a legal record of these engagements in an effort to
mitigate the uncertainty of oceanic travel and trade.
Even as changes in British policy stripped away the qazi’s more
explicitly commercial functions, by recording social
transactions, the qazi’s register remained instrumental in
promoting and protecting the city’s commercial activities. As
his status among locals relied on his family history and
reputation, his relevance to outsiders rested in his authority
under Islamic law. Studying the qazi of Bharuch from his
position as legal official and community leader, as Company
correspondent and plaintive petitioner, provides a microcosmic
view of local transformations in the practice of Islamic law.
Elizabeth Lhost is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Departments of
South Asian Languages and Civilizations & History at the
University of Chicago. Her dissertation, tentatively entitled
“Between Community and Qānūn: Documenting Islamic Legal
Practice in 19th century South Asia,” examines responses among
Islamic legal practitioners to the challenges of colonial
bureaucracy. Focusing on the writings and documentary
practices of qazis and muftis, she studies the history of legal
modernization in the context of religio-legal practice across the
subcontinent.
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Sanne Ravensbergen (Leiden University): Anchors of
Colonial Rule: Pluralistic Legal Courts and Criminal Justice
in Colonial Java 1803-1848
Central to this paper is the practice of criminal justice conducted
by the Landraad (plural: Landraden), a pluralistic regional legal
court in colonial Java. During the 19th century, imperial justice
in Java was predominantly mediated during sessions of the
Landraad, where the European resident as well as the Javanese
regent, the Chinese captain, the Islamic penghulu (cleric and
mosque administrator) and the indigenous jaksa (public
prosecutor) made their appearance. Criminal cases and legal
correspondence in the archives in Jakarta and The Hague show
that verdicts administered in this pluralistic setting were the
product of a transcultural process. The Landraad served as a site
where several knowledge and power networks connected and
interacted. Therefore, these councils inform us not only about
colonial justice, but also about the daily dynamics of colonial
rule, and the uses of colonial justice by the officials, advisors
and judges themselves. This paper investigates the workings of
the Landraad in Java during the first half of the 19th century, but
it also traces back the origins of this pluralistic legal court being
introduced in Java during the 18th century. The VOC era (16021799) and the period of the developing colonial state in the
Netherlands Indies (1800-1942) are often researched as two
separate time frames with its own characteristics. However, this
paper aims to focus on continuity rather than change. First, it
will argue that the actual purposes and pluralist organisation of
the Landraad in Java did not change much during the 18th and
19th century. Second, it will describe how the network of
Landraden expanded during the first half of the 19th century and
how uniformity became an important new feature. Third, it
shows the importance of the Landraad and criminal justice for
early colonial state formation in Java. The Landraden were
anchors which made colonial rule - necessarily based on indirect
rule - visible into every corner of Java.
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Sanne Ravensbergen is a PhD-candidate at the Leiden
University Institute for History. She is currently working on a
NWO-funded PhD-research project entitled Crime and
punishment in the Dutch East Indies 1816-1918. By studying
colonial legal archives in Indonesia and the Netherlands, this
project analyzes the complexities of criminal law practice in a
colonial multi-ethnic society. Colonial legal correspondence and
criminal cases serve as historical sources to unravel political and
social processes in the colony.
Nikitas Hatzimihail (University of Cyprus): The Indian Ocean
in the Mediterranean Sea: law reform and Indian
transplants in British colonial Cyprus
My paper examines the diffusion/transplantation of British
colonial legislation first enacted in nineteenth-century India (and
subsequently circulated across the Indian Ocean, from British
African colonies to Australia) in the British-controlled territories
of the Eastern Mediterranean, notably Cyprus, in the first half of
the twentieth century. My principal emphasis lies in two
landmark pieces of legislation (veritable codes): the Indian
Contract Act 1872 and the Indian Penal Code 1862, which were
both enacted in Cyprus in 1930. In telling the story of the two
codes, from their inception to their travels across the Empire to
their new life in the Mediterranean, I wish to explore themes
such as:
(a) the global governance effected by British colonial rule
and the web established by the circulation of colonial
officials and written material (even in a colony that saw
no immigration from other parts of the Empire, apart
from rotating colonial officers).
(b) Notions, then and now, about law’s connection to
society, as we observe near-identical legal regimes
being enacted in different regions and different times
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(c) Notions, then and now, about English law and the
common law and its suitability for the various parts of
the Empire. What made the British colonial officials
decide to transplant Indian legislation to Cyprus in the
so-called (Hatzimihail) second wave of colonial law
reform in the late 1920s and then shift to English law
for the third and fourth wave in the 1930s and 1950s?)
Nikitas Hatzimihail is Associate Professor of Private Law and
vice-chair of the Law Department at the University of Cyprus.
He obtained his LL.B. from the University of Athens and his
doctorate from Harvard Law School and worked as a senior
research at the University of Brussels (U.L.B.). He is the author
of Pre-Classical Conflict of Laws (forthcoming in 2013 from
Cambridge Univ. Press) and the co-editor (with Arnaud Nuyts)
of Cross-Border Class Actions: The European Way (Sellier,
2013) and International Litigation in Intellectual Property and
Information Technology (Kluwer, 2008).
Kirsty Walker (Center for History and Economics, Harvard
University): Policing Intimacy: Khalwat and the Everyday
Life of Islamic Law in British Malaya
Since the turn of the twentieth century, khalwat has been
enshrined in Islamic legal enactments in the Malay world as a
crime of illicit proximity between unrelated, unmarried Muslim
men and women. As it travelled into legal practice in British
Malaya, khalwat reshaped Islamic conceptions of personal
morality governing social and intimate interactions, infusing
them with creole, local meanings. As Asia’s mobility revolution
and the economic transformations wrought by colonial
capitalism deepened and diversified the ethnic and religious
landscape of Malaya, khalwat increasingly became a crime of
interethnic intimacy. While British reforms reinvented the
hukum shara as a Muslim personal law, limited in scope and
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content to matters of family law and religious practice, they
cemented the union of Malay sovereignty with Islam,
empowering a new, formal Islamic administration to exercise
near total control over the intimate lives of its Malay, Muslim
subjects. Yet whilst the Islamic authorities had no claim to
jurisdiction over the lives of the non-Muslim migrants,
domiciled and creole inhabitants of Malaya, crimes of intimacy
challenged the conflation of religious identity with race, and the
binaries of indigeneity and foreignness on which the law was
based. Khalwat exposed a legal fault line within the unruly
terrain of multiple, overlapping legalities in British Malaya. This
paper explores the everyday life of interethnic intimacy through
the lens of khalwat and its positioning at the intersection of
competing Islamic and colonial, religious and secular
jurisdictions. It argues that laws of intimacy became a site for
authoritative discourses on normative and illicit sexualities, as
well as a contested terrain for the negotiation of Malay
sovereignty. At the same time, they were shaped by mobility,
urban modernity and poverty, kinship structures and local
politics, and crucially, by the individuals who encountered them.
Through the voices of the Malay, Chinese, Indian, Javanese
shopkeepers, labourers, ticket sellers, clerks, prostitutes, widows,
divorcees and others who found themselves called before the
Shari’a courts in breach of Islamic laws of personal morality,
the social life of the law comes into view. Their testimony offers
an encounter with the visceral ways in which Islamic law was
understood and misunderstood by those who were subject to its
punishments. In their fearful, brazen and often unapologetic
confrontations with the law and its officers, this paper explores
the silent narrative of absorption, accommodation and everyday
resistance which lay at the heart of legal practice in the Indian
Ocean world.
Kirsty Walker is a social and cultural historian who specializes
in transnational approaches to intimacy, race, and colonialism in
Southeast Asian history. Her first book project, Creole Shadow
Empire: A History of Intimacy in Southeast Asia, examines an
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intersecting network of creole diasporas in colonial and early
post-colonial Southeast Asia. Through a series of intimate
histories of interethnic encounters, the book reveals the ways in
which creole families used cultural, legal and political arenas to
negotiate their own definitions of identity, legitimacy, and
citizenship. She received her PhD in History from the University
of Cambridge in 2015, and she also holds an MA from
Universiti Sains Malaysia, Penang and a BA from the University
of Cambridge.
Nathan Perl-Rosenthal (University of Southern California):
The Osterley: Law, community and the sea in French
Mauritius (ca. 1779-1780)
In May, 1779, a pair of French warships captured the
homeward-bound British Indiaman Osterley off the Cape of
Good Hope and brought the vessel in to Port Louis, Mauritius,
for condemnation. What might have been just another routine
prize procedure, however, took a dramatic turn. Somewhere
between the moment of capture and when the French authorities
examined the Osterley in port, a quantity of silver worth several
hundred thousand pounds seems to have disappeared from the
Indiaman’s hold.
Though criminal proceedings against
privateering captains were relatively rare by the late eighteenth
century, the royal prosecutor in Port Louis took the “rumors” of
theft seriously enough to open a probe. His investigation into
the Osterley quickly expanded into a massive inquiry, which
drew in not only the crews of the capturing vessels but also a
substantial number of Mauritians from all walks of life: wealthy
merchants and officials as well as stevedores and enslaved
boatmen. The investigation resulted in criminal charges against
a number of individuals. Just as important, however, was the
record that it left behind: three large cartons of interrogations,
procedures and documents, which together constitute a snapshot
of the legal worlds of privateersmen and their interlocutors as
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they straddled empires and the land-sea divide in the late early
modern era. These records have to my knowledge never been
the subject of extended study.
The paper I propose for “Ocean of Law” will use the case of the
Osterley, broadly contextualized, to investigate histories of law
and legality in the eighteenth-century Indian Ocean world. The
paper will consider both the social construction of law and the
socio-economic effects of imperial law’s operation at the
margins of empire. In some respects, the case covers familiar
territory: just another example of how imperial law operated in a
colonial context. Yet the case has two features that make it
uncommon and instructive. First, it involved an unusually
complex legal landscape, with considerations of imperial prize
law, local and colonial criminal law, and naval (military) law. It
thus offers an exceptional window into how actors on the
imperial margins navigated across multiple legal regimes with
overlapping spheres of jurisdiction. Because large sums of
money were at stake, moreover, the actors’ ability to
successfully negotiate through these legal thickets had
potentially significant economic consequences.
Second, and perhaps most fruitfully, the nature of the surviving
sources offer a rich ground for examining how actors of
different social statuses in Mauritius interpreted and understood
a single legal system, prize law. The prosecutor interrogated
most of the suspects and witnesses not only about their
knowledge of facts and events but also about their understanding
of prize law. (He was trying to determine whether violations of
the law were intentional or the result of ignorance or
misinformation.) This line of questioning revealed a remarkable
range of different understandings of prize law, which drew on
texts, customs, even rumor. This plurality of interpretation, the
evidence suggests, owed much to the Indian Ocean context—a
world that reshaped the dictates of European prize law as it
filtered them through pluralistic, multi-national local
communities.
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Nathan Perl-Rosenthal is assistant professor of history at the
University of Southern California. He works on the political and
cultural history of the early modern world, with a particular
focus on the North Atlantic and the first age of revolutions, circa
1760-1815. His first book, Citizen Sailors: Becoming American
in the Age of Revolution, was published by Belknap/Harvard in
October, 2015. It shows how mariners helped define the idea of
national citizenship in the United States during the era of the
American and French Revolutions. He is now working on a
book, loosely related to his dissertation, that aims to offer the
first transnational cultural history of politics in the age of
revolution.
Nadeera Rupesinghe (Leiden University) Navigating
Pluralities: Colonial Lawmaking in Eighteenth-century
Galle
This paper discusses selected aspects of the law employed in a
judicial forum set up by the Dutch East India Company (VOC)
in 1741. The Landraad, a kind of district court in Galle in
southern Sri Lanka had a majority of VOC officials and a
minority of subordinate local headmen. It shows a form of
coexistence of two apparently competing sets of norms, that of
the VOC and the local normative order, within a single system.
It was a space in which custom was potentially negotiated, and
where agency was multifarious. It exemplifies a forum where a
choice of laws came into play, that choice being significant at
varying degrees for different areas of the law such as evidence,
inheritance, land and marriage law. Such integration is a key
feature of legal pluralism. This paper describes the lived
experience of inter-legality within the Dutch legal regime. The
existing literature on Roman-Dutch law in Sri Lanka has
suffered from a lack of empirical research and inattention to the
developing field of socio-legal studies of legal pluralism. While
there was inevitable conflict in such inter-legality, in practice the
local normative order was as much a social fact for the early
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colonial rulers as Roman-Dutch law. The nuances of everyday
practice must be studied, as they reveal potentially unexpected
results such as rejection and manipulation of legal practice by
local actors.
Nadeera Rupesinghe is a doctoral candidate at the Leiden
University Institute for History. Her interests lie in the study of
colonial law and social history. She began her BA in history
(honours) in 2001 at the University of Colombo. Thereafter she
studied for six years at Leiden University, the latter half as an
assistant-in-opleiding (aio; teaching and research assistant) at
the Institute for History from 2010 to 2013, a position funded by
the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research and the
Leiden University Fund.
Arthur Weststeijn (Koninklijk Nederlands Instituut te Rome):
Provincializing Grotius: International Law and Empire in a
Seventeenth-Century Malay Mirror
This paper opens up a ‘peripheral’ perspective on the conflated
history of international law and empire, in particular the
seventeenth-century Dutch empire by law in Southeast Asia, by
‘provincializing’ the paramount figure of Hugo Grotius. To
collapse the dominant hierarchy of centre and periphery, the
paper looks at Grotius from a contemporary non-European
mirror: the Malay treatise Taj al-Salatin [‘The Crown of All
Kings’], composed by the author Bukhari al-Jauhari in 1603 in
the Sultanate of Aceh in north Sumatra. Through a
contextualised and comparative reading of tis treatise, the paper
poses the hypothetical question how the Southeast Asian readers
of Taj al-Salatin might have read Grotius’ De jure praedae. This
exercise of contextual comparison (that is also an exercise in
establishing the possibilities of commensurability between East
and West), reveals how certain crucial aspects of Grotius’ theory,
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particular the theme of recognition and obligation, were
dominant features of political thought in the Malay region. At
the same time, however, the Southeast Asian perspective shows
that Grotius’ proposition of the Dutch East India Company as a
sovereign actor with international legal personality, as well as
his distinction between the legal, the religious and the political
realm, must have been absolutely alien to his imagined
Southeast Asian readers. Taj al-Salatin, a treatise conceived as a
mirror of princes, thus serves as a Malay mirror that reflects the
oddities of international law and empire in its Grotian guise.
Arthur Weststeijn is since 2011 the director of historical
studies at the Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome. He obtained
his PhD from the European University Institute in Florence and
he specializes in early-modern Dutch intellectual history from an
international perspective.
Stephanie Jones (University of Southampton): General
histories and piratical geographies: the Indian Ocean as a
cultural formation of justice
Scholars of empire commonly acknowledge that the terms pirate
and privateer, buccaneer and corsair (as well as raider, rover, sea
thief, marauder, freebooter, swashbuckler…) were used lightly
and interchangeably within colloquial, literary, personal and
administrative contexts. But in recent and popular accounts of
the British empire, those shifty and extended legal moments in
which either the pirate (outlaw predator of maritime commerce)
becomes the privateer (state-sanctioned predator of maritime
commerce) or the privateer becomes the pirate have acquired the
weight of both origin and paradigm. For example, in his
prominent Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (2003),
Niall Ferguson finds both actual beginning and broad analogue
for the history of imperialism in the life-myth of Henry
Morgan’s rise from pirate to admiral to governor to planter
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(circa 1635-1688). To very different political effect, Lauren
Benton’s much referenced A Search for Sovereignty: Law and
Geography in European Empires 1400-1900 (2010) finds an
origin in the moment that the pirate loudly performs himself as a
privateering vanguard, initiating both the imposition of
European law on further geographies, and the regionalisation of
that law. Focusing on scenes of maritime encounter, Miles
Ogborn’s high profile Global Lives: Britain and the World
1550-1800 (2008) recognises definitive transformations from
‘sea-going noblemen in the sixteenth century’ into ‘mercantile
buccaneers in the seventeenth century’ into ‘merely common
sailors helping themselves to booty in the early eighteenth
century’. Ogborn uses the privateer-pirate to summarise key
political and perceptive changes marking epochs of imperialism,
as well as the changing class politics of empire.
Such turns to the figure of the pirate to exemplify
comprehensive dynamics are methodologically troubling: and
not least because they heavily rely upon the narratives of piracy
offered in ‘Captain Charles Johnson’s’ The General History [of
the Pyrates] (1724). The fictional nature of this text has been
curiously irrelevant to scholars in search of anecdotes to
exemplify large arguments about history and law. But while the
book has been influentially deployed to expansive and assertive
effect, it remains remarkably under-studied. This paper offers a
reading of the text’s ranging, contradictory (sometimes earnest,
sometimes feckless) approaches to order and resistance, and to
legitimate and illegitimate violence. It moves from tracing the
book’s intricate fictional narrative forms towards an appreciation
of its central and critical engagements with Indian Ocean
geographies and geolegal forms. In understanding how oceans
and islands—real and fictional—are represented as piratical
geographies, the paper understands it’s representation of the
Indian Ocean as intimately bound to narratives of justice.
Dr Stephanie Jones BA and LLB (ANU) PhD (Cambridge) is
an Associate Professor in English at the University of
Southampton, UK. She currently works on texts about the
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Indian Ocean, and within the field of law and literature. Her
publications include papers on the poetics of maritime law;
fictional and historical piracy and privateering; literary and legal
belonging; and East African and South Asian literatures.
Renisa Mawani (University of British Columbia): Imperial
Circuits of Law: The Case of Gurdit Singh (1859-1954)
In this paper, I begin to chart one itinerary of British law across
the Indian Ocean region. My interest is not in colonial lawyers
or elites but in the circuitous movements of colonial subjects and
in the critical legal imaginaries their travels facilitated.
Specifically, my focus centers on the peregrinations of Baba
Gurdit Singh, a fifty-six year old literate but not formally
educated railway contractor. In May 1914, Singh became wellknown across the British Empire. He chartered a Japanese
steamship - the Komagata Maru – and transported 376 Punjabi
migrants from Hong Kong to Canada. The journey was intended
to challenge Dominion and imperial restrictions on Indian
migration and to address the question of British subjecthood.
Originally from the Amritsar district of Punjab, Gurdit Singh left
home at the age of 26. He lived and worked between Singapore
and Malaya, first for a Chinese pork dealer, then operating a
dairy business, and eventually joining the flourishing railway
contracting industry. His travels across the Eastern Indian Ocean
region, I argue, were vital to his critical imaginary, including the
racial violence and anticolonial possibilities he ascribed to
British law.
Through a close reading of Gurdit Singh’s memoirs, this paper
considers how law travels, not through the formal channels of
colonial authorities, legal statutes, and judicial opinions but in
the counter-movements of anticolonial dissent. Law circulated
across the Indian Ocean region not solely through the mobility
of colonial elites but also along the itineraries of imperial
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subjects. To be sure, the travels of law were initiated through
shared legal forms, in texts and documents, in decisions and
decrees. But law also moved through the promises and
possibilities it evoked for colonial subjects. In Singh’s view, law
was an oppressive force and an emancipatory ideal. It accrued its
meanings, gained its power, and demonstrated its promise
through its own imperial circulations and instantiations: Malaya,
India, Canada.
For Singh, the mobility of law did not follow a straightforward,
smooth, or unidirectional line. Law was not initiated in London
and then extended effortlessly to the colonies. Rather,
conceptions of legality and their implementation as law traveled
through colonial and anticolonial struggle, critique, and
contestation. Law, we might say, moved in much the same way
as the Komagata Maru, traversing and connecting disparate
regions of the British Empire through oceanic migrations and in
newly emergent forms and sedimentations.
Renisa Mawani (PhD, University of Toronto) is an Associate
Professor of Sociology and inaugural Chair of the Law and
Society Program at the University of British Columbia. Dr.
Mawani works in the fields of critical theory and colonial legal
history and has published widely on law, colonialism, and legal
geography. Her first book, Colonial Proximities (2009) details
the legal encounters between indigenous peoples, Chinese
migrants, “mixed-race” populations, and Europeans in latenineteenth and early-twentieth-century British Columbia. Her
second book, Across Oceans of Law (under contract with Duke
University Press), is a global and maritime legal history of the
Japanese ship, Komagata Maru. The book draws on oceans as
method to trace the ship’s 1914 route across the Pacific and
Indian Oceans, to advance the argument that legal forms of
colonial and racial violence are deeply entangled, and to
consider time as a critical register of empire. With Iza Hussin,
she is co-editor of “The Travels of Law: Indian Ocean
Itineraries” published in Law and History Review (2014). In
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2015, she received the Killam Prize for Graduate Instruction, a
Dean of Arts Faculty Research Award, and was named a Wall
Scholar at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies.
Byapti Sur (Leiden University): Local Agency in the Dutch
East India Company’s Power-politics for Combatting
Corruption in Bengal, 1684-1688
The notion of corruption as a menace began occurring more
frequently in the administrative vocabulary of the Dutch East
India Company (VOC) from the latter half of the seventeenth
century. As a counter-measure, the Heeren XVII (Company’s
Board of Directors) started dispatching investigation committees
to the overseas factories for checking into corruption and other
malpractices. The most prominent of these committees was the
one sent in 1684 to the western quarters of the VOC under the
command of Hendrik Adriaan van Reede tot Drakestein, Lord of
Mijdrecht. His executive powers were unprecedented in the
history of the Company as he had full authority to reside at any
place and interrogate or put on trial any director or governor he
suspected. However, the desperation of the VOC in trying to
curb corruption faced repeated challenges – firstly with the
sudden death of Van Reede on his way to Surat with rumours of
him being poisoned by his opponents and secondly, the almost
sham success of the committee. Can it possibly be denied then
that Van Reede was treading on dangerous grounds that hid the
darker and deeper secrets of power-politics within the VOC
bureaucracy? By exploring this factor further, my paper seeks to
find answers to the reasons behind the failure of this committee.
In studying the case of Nicolas Schagen, the then director of
Bengal who along with his wife was accused of smuggling and
illegal activities by the committee and tried in the Raad van
Justitie (Council of Justice in Batavia), the informal networks of
the Company is revealed and consequently a whole game of
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bureaucratic power-politics. The fact that corruption was used as
a tool to attack political rivals and install men of one’s own
faction affected the investigation and judicial processes of the
VOC which I argue, provide an explanation for the unsuccessful
story of the committee. Patronages and friendships formed the
basis of multiple factions within the administration so that
allegations of corruption or rather what constituted corruption
was dependent on the policies of the dominant group in power.
As this created a system where the key players in the political
space within the Dutch Republic could sync their networks with
the Heeren XVII, the situation of the VOC in Asia seemed
different. The intrusion of local elements (brokers) in the
Company’s networks who were beyond the jurisdiction of the
legal court (Raad van Justitie in Batavia) in the seventeenth
century but were powerful enough to disturb the harmony of this
political game of corruption, added to the frustrated anticorruption efforts of the committee. In the end the absence of a
conscious public gaze in Asia which was present in the Republic
also made a difference in influencing the judicial decisions.
Thus focusing on these hidden politics behind the more visible
policies and decisions on corruption, my paper attempts to show
how the Company’s legal processes or decision-making bodies
were more connected to personal networks rather than static
categories of an official Company – State – and the locals.
Byapti Sur is a doctoral candidate at the Leiden University
Institute for History. Her research looks into the trans-imperial
networks of the Dutch East India Company agents and their
local counterparts under the Mughal Empire in Bengal in the
seventeenth century. She uses the politics of corruption in the
administration as a tool for studying these networks. Her
supervisors are Prof. dr. Jos Gommans and Dr. Lodewijk
Wagenaar.
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Guo-Quan Seng (University of Chicago): Dutch and Chinese
Patrimonial Legal Discourse and the Domestication of
Women’s Commerce in Colonial Java (1830s-1890s)
This paper examines the history of Dutch colonial jurisprudence
in Java at the intersection of global Orientalist knowledge
production and particular ethnographies of the Chinese family
between 1862 and 1892. Beginning from 1862, Sinology-trained
Dutch translators advised colonial judges and jurists on
“Chinese law” and the drafting of a Chinese private law code for
colonial Java. Trained by members of the Chinese literati class
in Southern Chinese treaty ports, these professional Sinologisttranslators brought classical neo-Confucian visions of the
Chinese family to bear on judicial decisions over Chinese
inheritance. The first half of the paper analyzes the midnineteenth century transimperial knowledge formation of a field
of comparative Chinese family law discourse. I trace the
emergence of this body of Chinese family law discourse to the
imperial politics of Henry Sumner Maine’s comparative law
project, which identified the absolutist patria potestas as an
intermediate stage in the progress of Western civil law, and
prescribed Roman legal evolution as the standard for all
colonized cultures. Within this framework, Sinologists (British,
French, German) based in the Chinese treaty ports and French
Indochina discoursed over the evolutionary place of Chinese
family law through textual analyses of Chinese ethics and law
from the 1860s to 1890s.
Although the Dutch did not participate directly in these
transimperial Chinese family law debates, the Sinology-trained
Dutch translators responded to the same ethnographic questions
in the legal advice they offered to colonial judges. The second
half of the paper analyzes the legal ethnographic knowledge
these new experts brought to bear on debates over creole
Chinese women’s rights as daughters, wives and widows over
the thirty year period. Three schools of thought emerged among
the translators. The first, held by what I call the Sinology purists
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(Gustaaf Schlegel), translated Chinese ethical and legal textual
norms directly into the civil law discourse of rights and duties.
The purists concluded that the Chinese woman had no rights and
was treated as a “thing” (zaak) by the Chinese patriarch. The
pragmatists (W. P. Groeneveldt), however, countered the purist
view by arguing for a pragmatic reading of Chinese legal
inheritance-in-practice. The Chinese woman had partial rights in
some instances. Finally, a third realist school (P. Meeter)
emerged in the commercially flourishing city of Semarang. The
realists agreed with the purists that the Chinese woman had no
rights. But they went even further by arguing that pragmatist
jurisprudence condoned the Chinese patriarchal manipulation of
their womenfolk to abuse law under the cover of women’s rights.
Although judicial policy fluctuated along with the translators’
varying visions of classic Chinese patriarchy, the general trend
over the course of these three decades was the curtailment of the
rights of the Peranakan Chinese wife, widow and daughter in
favor of classic Chinese patrilineal inheritance.
Guo-Quan Seng recently obtained his PhD in History from the
University of Chicago, with the dissertation, "Disputed
properties, contested identities: family law, social reform and the
creole Chinese in Dutch Colonial Java (1830-1942)". He is now
a Visiting Fellow with the Southeast Asia Program at Cornell
University, working on turning the dissertation into a book. He
is broadly interested in the histories of the Overseas Chinese,
Global Capitalism, and Postcolonial Asia.
Léon Buskens (Leiden University): Constructing a colonial
Shāfiʿī law canon in Indonesia
In less than a century Dutch scholars in oriental philology and
law constructed an understanding of what Shafi`i law should
look like, thereby both advancing scholarship and answering
questions emanating in colonial administration. The formation
of the colonial canon started with the edition of the first
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handbook on Shafi’i law in Malay by Meursinge in 1844. His
successor at the colonial institute in Delft Salomo Keyzer greatly
contributed to the increase in knowledge, applied in his
education of colonial civil servants, by his editions, translations,
and handbooks on Shafi`i law. He also met with severe criticism
and disapproval by “practical men” in the field who considered
knowledge of customary law and local languages much more
important for the maintenance of law and order in the Dutch
colony. His successor in Delft the orientalist A.W.T. Juynboll
contributed to the field with several learned studies on specific
issues, but died rather young. His successor, the former adviser
for Islamic affairs in Batavia L.W.C. van den Berg, continued
the approach of Keyzer in publishing editions, translations, and a
handbook of Islamic law, destined at colonial administrative
practice and the teaching of civil servants. Van den Berg is now
mainly remembered for the devastating criticism of his work that
Snouck Hurgronje published. Snouck Hurgronje wrote many
learned studies on specific subjects, but would leave it to his
younger colleague Th.W. Juynboll to write an authoritative
handbook on Shafi`i law which incorporated the master’s views
on the relations between Islamic law as found in the scholarly
treatises and the practice of local customs, which he promoted
together with Van Vollenhoven to be transformed into adatrecht.
Juynboll’s synopsis of 1903 was reprinted several times, even in
the United States during the Second World War, and translated
into German and Italian. On the basis of a tradition of sixty years
of research, and the publication of a handy “teach yourself”
Islamic law handbook Juynboll produced a canonical view of the
Shafi`i school for colonial purposes, which would remain in use
until the end of the twentieth century.
In my paper I will focus on the different textual genres which
the scholars practiced to produce this canon, their collecting and
selecting of sources, and the use of typography to present their
findings. I will also take into consideration their relations with
local Indonesian and foreign European scholars.
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Léon Buskens is an anthropologist studying law and culture in
Muslim societies. He studied anthropology, standard and
Moroccan Arabic, and Islam, at Radboud University in
Nijmegen, where he specialised in historical and Mediterranean
anthropology (BA and MA, both cum laude). From 1987 he was
a Ph.D. student at the Faculty of Law of Leiden University.
Since 1991, he works as a lecturer on anthropology and Islamic
law at the faculties of Humanities and Law of Leiden University.
From 1998 until 2008 he also held a chair for Law and Culture
of Islam at Utrecht University. Since 2009 he has a chair for
Law and Culture in Muslim societies at Leiden University. Since
2009 he is director of the Leiden University Centre for the Study
of Islam and Society (LUCIS) and since 2010 also of the
Netherlands Interuniversity School for Islamic Studies (NISIS).
Buskens was a visiting fellow at the department of Near Eastern
Studies of Princeton University, the Escuela de Estudios Árabes
in Granada, and a visiting professor at the Ecole des Hautes
Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris.
Santhosh Abraham and Visakh Madhusoodanan Subha
(Indian
Institute of Technology Madras) Recasting and
Reimagining the Islamic Law and Jurisprudence: Colonial
and Post-colonial Discourses on Muslim Law in Malabar,
Kerala
The ‘incommensurable divide’ between the secular language of
state law and customary practices (often understood within the
framework of religious laws) has become a heated debate in
post-colonial India. Some of these divisions are expressed in the
contemporary debates over the uniformity in law applicable to
the citizens. Often framed within the state Vs religion dichotomy,
these debates posit the issue as a confrontation between the
uniform civil code and the religious/cultural rights of minority
communities to adhere to customary practices in a liberal secular
polity. Working within this logic, the state legal authorities and
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the public debates generally view religious laws as a ‘formal
system’ which revolves around texts (legal codes) rather than as
an ‘interpretative system’, embedded in customs and alternative
dispute resolution mechanisms within the religion. The former
understanding serves to reinforce the authority of the formal
practices of law and to limit the functioning of the latter. This
legal positivist approach to law is concomitant with the rise of
the modern nation states; place of law in state formation,
governmentality and making of modern citizens. What is being
lost here is a crucial insight into the ‘interpretative informal
system’ situated within the ‘vernacular’ dynamics of law
internal to Islamic religion. It is at this juncture that a critical
analysis into the historical, sociological and philosophical
background of the problematic with specific attention into the
codification process, colonial legal reform, religious authority,
place of custom in Islamic law and religious reform become
important.
Many of the contemporary engagements between state and
Islamic law should be seen as a continuation of early British
colonial attempts to transform Islamic law into Muhammadan
law. The early British attempts exhibited the anxieties the
intermixed nature of religious identities posed to the colonial
project of governance vis-à-vis land, tradition and the exercise
of sovereign authority. This ensued in the construction of
monolithic religious identities through a sovereign exercise of
state legal power as evidenced in the colonial legal reform
starting from Hasting’s plan of 1772 till the Shariat act of 1937.
The post colonial state’s concerns over the Muslim Personal law
can be considered as a continuation of this approach to religious
laws with poor regard to the vernacular and culturally
embedded nature of customary practices constituting what is
understood as ‘Muslim law’. However, the problem assumes
new significance when secularism as a political doctrine is
increasingly challenged with respect to its potential in protecting
minority religious rights and the resurgence of religion in public
sphere in newer ways. It is at this post-secular context that we
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need to have a disaggregated view of both religion and law
(including the so-called religious laws) with special focus on the
secularization processes within the religion, transformation in
the nature of religious authorities,
changes in the legal
reasoning and modes of argumentation. What is the customary
language of law that unravels in such specific social, political
and cultural contexts?
This paper particularly focuses on the case of British Malabar
and contemporary Kerala Islamic society to bring out the
debates and interactions between the state law and Islamic law
(focusing on ‘custom’ in Islamic law and ‘customary’ nature of
law as a theoretical category) during colonial and post-colonial
periods in India. What is at stake here is the changes and
transformations internal to Islamic law as it is practiced in the
socio-political, historical and cultural terrain of Malabar region.
The study proposes that such attempts at understanding the
grammar of customary practices is crucial in reimagining the
way in which Islamic law and jurisprudence is generally
understood.
Dr. Santhosh Abraham received PhD in History from
University of Hyderabad, India in 2010 and is currently working
as Assistant Professor in History in the Department of
Humanities and Social Sciences at Indian Institute of
Technology Madras (IITM), Chennai, India. Abraham’s research
interests include Studies on Muslims of Early British India,
Indigenous Resistances to Colonialism, Colonial Law, Social
and Cultural History and Colonial Psychiatry. Abraham’s recent
publications include, ‘Constructing the Extraordinary Criminals:
Mappila Muslims and Legal Encounters in Early British
Colonial Malabar’, Published in Journal of World History,
Volume 25, Issue 2-3, December 2014, University of Hawai’i
Press and ‘Formal Writing, Questionnaires and Petitions:
Colonial Governance and Law in Early British Malabar’,
Published in Indian Historical Review (Sage International),
Vol.40, No.2, December 2013, pp.285-305. Abraham recently
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received Wellcome Trust, UK Research Grant for a project on
Psychiatry and Asylums in Colonial Kerala.
Visakh Madhusoodanan Subha is a PhD scholar in the
department of Humanities and Social Sciences at Indian Institute
of Technology Madras (IITM), Chennai, India. Visakh currently
works on ‘Grammar of Customary Practices: Religious
Authority and New Legal Sensibilities among Mappila Muslims
of Malabar, Kerala’ as part of his PhD program under the
supervision of Dr. Santhosh Abraham. His research interests
include sociology of law, religion, jurisprudence, comparative
legal systems and identity politics. Visakh has been nominated
for the Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research Fellowship 2016 to
pursue nine months of research as a visiting scholar at a US
university and is awaiting final confirmation.
Hassan S. Khalilieh (University of Haifa): The Holy Qur’ān,
the Prophet, and the Islamic Genesis of the Free Sea
It is generally accepted that the doctrine of modern law of the
sea developed out of Renaissance Europe attributing its
inception to the Dutch’s foremost jurist Hugo Grotius (15831645), whose Mare Liberum is none other than Chapter XII of
his treatise De Jure Praedae written in winter 1604-1605 is
considered a milestone for the subject. In an attempt to defend
and justify the right of other nations to navigate freely the seas,
Grotius contends that, with the exception of limited offshore
zone, the seas are free and not susceptible to appropriation by
States. In reaction to his thesis, a legal debate sparked among
contemporaneous European lawyers, who either espoused or
challenged his theory, prompting scholarly contribution to the
principles of the law of the sea. Both, the advocates and the
opponents of the freedom of navigation, were either inspired by
the Natural Law theories as instituted in the Justinianic Institutes
and Corpus Juris Civilis, or the Hebrew Bible in applying the
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concept of sovereignty to the open sea, as the Protestant John
Selden (1584-1654) does in his Of the Dominion or Ownership
of the Sea (Mare Clausum sive de dominio maris), published in
1635. Astoundingly, the seventeenth-century European lawyers
deliberately or “accidently” overlook the contribution of the
“infidels” (non-Europeans), especially Muslims, to the evolution
of the customary law of the sea leaving an impression as if the
Law of Nature and Nations governing access to the sea are a
European establishment.
Until the emergence of the Portuguese the freedom of navigation
in the eastern seas was a common practice. By the beginning of
the seventeenth-century and the appearance of the Dutch East
India Company the concept of mare liberum and the freedom of
commerce between littoral countries along the Indian Ocean
were no longer confined to indigenes and Asians. The ocean
which was common to peoples of Southeast Asia and Near East
was now shared by European naval powers so that in 1615 the
Makassarese Sultān ‘Alāuddīn Tumenanga ri Gaukanna (10021049 A.H./1593-1639 C.E.) asked the Dutch East India
Company not to interfere with the ships of the Makassarese
kingdom of Goa on the high seas. A statement attributed to him
says: “God made the earth and the sea, has divided the earth
among mankind and given the sea in common. It is a thing
unheard of that anyone should be forbidden to sail the seas.” In
saying so, the Sultān acknowledges that unlike the land, Islamic
divine law considers the boundless sea as a common heritage of
mankind; any governing authority or nation can neither claim
proprietorship over it, nor exclusive right of navigation.
However, what has not then been elaborated by the Sultān will
be explored throughout our essay aiming to explain how Islamic
Law of Nature and Nations entitle human beings to share the sea
and enjoy equal rights of exploring and exploiting its natural
resources. Furthermore, it will present the Prophet’s practical
attitude towards the access to the sea, freedom of navigation,
jurisdiction over the vessel at sea, and the legal status of subjects
aboard national and foreign ships.
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Fahad Bishara (College of William and Mary): Dhows,
Empire, and International Law: “Law Talk” and the Muscat
Dhows Case, 1890-1905
Over the last decade of the nineteenth century, British patrol
ships in the Western Indian Ocean encountered a recurring
problem. Dhows from the small port of Sur, in southern Oman,
would raise the French flag whenever they were approached by
British gunboats or present naval officers with papers declaring
them to be French protégés. Their actions raised concern in
official circles, as the Suri dhows were often suspected of
transporting slaves. By the beginning of the twentieth century,
the matter had taken on international proportions: the
government of Great Britain brought the French government
before the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague, where
the parties grappled over on major questions of international law
like extraterritoriality and imperial subjecthood in dealing with
the question of whether the French consul had the right to grant
flags and passes to Suri dhows.
The case became foundational to studies of the law of the sea,
and the ruling is still cited in footnotes in law school textbooks
today. Buried in the case’s proceedings, however, are materials
that give historians a window into the legal imaginaries of
Indian Ocean mariners in an age of empire. In statements
collected by different consuls, Suri mariners revealed how they
saw their place in a world of empires and regulations, how they
understood imperial law to manifest itself in artifacts like flags
and passes, and how they articulated claims to particular rights
as members of a trans-oceanic community of sailors with
property and kinship ties to French possessions around the
Indian Ocean.
This paper draws from material in England, France, Zanzibar,
and Oman to chart out the multiple understandings of
international law that animated the proceedings in Muscat
Dhows case. It focuses on the claims made by the dhow captains
and mariners themselves, and how they drew on the language
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and artifacts of international law to effectively “speak law” to
the Sultan of Muscat and to French and British officials in the
Western Indian Ocean. Suri mariners used particular words and
phrases to locate themselves within an imperial legal geography,
and appropriated legal technologies – passes and flags – to help
them navigate an oceanic space marked by increasingly
cumbersome regulations. The claims they articulated and the
practices they engaged in at sea illuminate a maritime legal
culture at work – one animated by a long history of encountering
regional and global empires at sea. This sort of “law talk”
formed the backbone of a regional maritime legal culture in an
age of high imperialism, illustrating how a regime of
international law manifested itself in an ocean that ran thick with
legal idioms.
Fahad Bishara is Assistant Professor at College of William and
Mary. He received his PhD from Duke University in 2012 and
subsequently held a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard
University’s Center for History and Economics. He specializes
in the history of law and capitalism in the Indian Ocean and
Islamic world. His current book manuscript is a legal history of
economic life in the Western Indian Ocean, told through the
story of the Arab and Indian settlement and commercialization
of East Africa during the nineteenth century, a period of
emerging modern capitalism in the region, and the
transformations in Islamic law that accompanied it.
Seán Donlan (University of Limerick) and Mathilda Twomey
(Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the Republic of
Seychelles): Island, Intersection, or In-Between? Legal
Hybridity and Diffusion in the Seychellois Legal Tradition
All legal—and normative—traditions are hybrids. The laws and
legal institutions of the Seychellois micro-jurisdiction clearly
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reflect the diffusion of Europe’s most influential imperial legal
traditions. Located in the vast Indian Ocean and virtually
uninhabited before the late eighteenth century, the archipelago
would be subject alternatively to French and British rule. Both
Anglo-British and French law would apply. The result was a
legal métissage that parallels the blend of races, cultures and
languages in Seychelles.
This paper explores the complex history and changing legal and
normative hybridity of Seychelles. Hybridity is used here in
several senses. The first is related to the complex origins and
organisation of legal and normative systems, institutions, and
ideas. The second relates to the gap between the principles and
practices of legal orders, not least in colonial regimes. The third
is the recognition that individual and communal identities in
colonial encounters and post-colonial situations are singular
blends of mixed parentage. The paper takes a trans-disciplinary
approach that draws on research on mixed legal systems, legal
pluralisms, and post-colonial theories.
Unlike other colonial encounters between natives and
newcomers, however, the absence of an indigenous people on
the islands meant that there were no systematic autochthonous or
traditionally-organised normativities to resist the laws of the
imperial powers. In addition to French laws that applied to the
free whites and enslaved blacks, free blacks and ‘coloureds’
lived in a legal in-between. The laws were buffeted, too, by the
legal and political tsunamis of the revolution in France and the
Anglo-French wars that followed.
The two decades between c1794-1814 saw repeated, ephemeral
capitulations to the British, before its rule was clearly
established over a Francophone population that was some ninety
percent black or ‘coloured’. For a time, French laws applied
largely unchanged, but the English language and laws were
gradually imposed. Still more slowly, the integration of the races
began. By the early twentieth century, both laws and peoples
were deeply mixed through a process of creolisation. In addition
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to the gap between principle and practice, alternative
normativities inevitably arose alongside official law: some intra
legem, some praeter legem, some contra legem.
No less important developments within Britain and France were
occurring in Britain and France. After the French Revolution,
European laws and legal institutions underwent profound change.
The nineteenth century saw a move from the poly-juralism
common to the pre-modern period to organised, centralised, and
exclusive systems of common national laws. Indeed, it was a
period in which both many nations and modern states—along
with mature legal nationalism and legal positivism—were
created. And Europe’s colonial encounters were central to those
developments.
It is too easy to portray islands like Seychelles as isolated
peripheries away from the imperial centre. They are better seen
as intersections of laws and customs that generated complex
legalities in-between their mother traditions. And they would, as
a result, change their parents, too, as all children do.
Seán Patrick Donlan (JD (Louisiana), PhD (Trinity College
Dublin)) lectures at the University of Limerick, Ireland. He has
published in the areas of comparative law, history and legal
history, and legal philosophy, especially mixed legal systems,
legal pluralism, and micro-jurisdictions. He edits Comparative
Legal History, is Vice-President of the World Society of Mixed
Jurisdiction Jurists, past President of Juris Diversitas, and a
member of the International Academy of Comparative Law. His
latest publications are Donlan and Dirk Heirbaut, The law’s
many bodies: studies in legal hybridity and jurisdictional
complexity, c1600-1900 (2015) and Sue Farran, Esin Örücü, and
Donlan (eds), A Study of Mixed Legal Systems: Endangered,
Entrenched, or Blended (2014), which includes Mauritius and
Seychelles.
Mathilda Twomey (PhD (Galway)) is Chief Justice of the
Supreme Court of the Republic of Seychelles and a Justice of the
Seychelles Court of Appeal. She graduated with a BA in English
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and French Law from the University of Kent, holds a degree in
French Law from the University of Paris-Sud, and was admitted
as a Member of the Bar at Middle Temple, London. She also
served in the chambers of the Attorney General of Seychelles, as
an Attorney-at-Law in private chambers, and a member of
Seychelles Constitutional Commission. She holds an LLM in
Public Law from the National University of Ireland – Galway,
where she recently completed a PhD on ‘Legal Métissage in a
Micro-Jurisdiction: The Mixing of Common Law and Civil Law
in Seychelles’.
Naveen Kanalu (University of California, Los Angeles):
Governing, Decreeing and Administering Political
Authority: Encountering Persiante Styles in the Legal
Cultures of the Early Modern Deccan
Legal expressions of administrative politics in the early modern
South Asian context have rarely been studied as interlocked
mappings of “vernacular” legal conceptions that were infused by
Persianate and Islamicate influences through oceanic
connections. Reading royal decrees such as firmans, sanads and
administrative decrees such as the i’lamnamahs, ahkams, and
ruq’ahs from the Qutb Shahis (1518–1687), I wish to examine
how legal instruments enact political sovereignty and produce
discourses necessary for its diffusion. Furthermore, legal
documents are also practices in recording, codifying, and
promulgating regulations about instances of social institutions
such as religion, caste, and land rights. Thus they can inform us
how the “social life of the ordinary” was regulated. Presenting a
genealogical account of the formation of administrative
measures and how they are invariably inscribed as law – decrees,
measures, procedural regulations, I wish to analyse how these
practices emerged in peninsular South Asia through the
expansion of transregional Persianate cultural registers across
the Indian Ocean world.
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To do so, my paper will examine the legal culture of the Deccan
Sultanate from three perspectives. First, I will explore their
material form: what are the commonalities in legal instruments
as they develop through interaction with a Persianate form of
writing, recording, and chronicling? Are there Islamicate codes
of legalisation that are specified in the Deccan through the
incorporation of “vernacular” practices? In what way do they
share a common framework with Ottoman, Mughal, or Safavid
legal cultures? Second, reading the Persian chronicles of
Golconda, I will also bring in a subjective dimension in the legal
conception to administrative practices by studying migration of
savants and literati. Further, in the increasingly competitive
environment of sea faring and trading around the European
settlements on the littoral coasts, such legal instruments were
necessary to acquire political favours. Hence, I will explore legal
instruments as modes of not only translating migratory
connections across the Indian ocean world but also a shared
conception of polity that law produces. Third, can linguistic and
idiomatic registers show us how legal cultures were adapted in
plurilingual societies such as the Deccan? Rather than take the
transmission of legal codes or texts as my source material, I wish
to argue for a genealogical account of the formation of
categories of thinking political authority and law in the early
modern period.
What kind of legal epistemes emerge across the Indian Ocean
World in the early modern period and how do we render them
intelligible as regimes of political practice and thinking? What
can lexical indices to name the legal processes in early modern
times tell us about the status community groupings such as
nobilities, castes and religions? Examining chancellery and
chronicle sources, I will explore how we can archive (in the
Foucauldian sense) legal idioms in an ever more diffused
Persianate cosmopolis of the Indian Ocean World.
Naveen Kanalu is PhD student in South Asian History at the
University of California, Los Angeles. In 2014-15, he was
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a Teaching and Research fellow (ATER) at the Université de
Strasbourg. Ancien élève of the Ecole Normales Supérieure,
Paris, he obtained Masters in Philosophy, Iranian Studies, and
the History of Economic Thought. His research interests
include medieval and early modern South Asian history,
Persianate culture and Critical Theory. In the South Asian field,
his publications include “Le Sāhasabhīmavijayam ou
Gadāyuddham de Ranna: une adaptation du Mahābhārata dans la
littérature de l’ancien kannada” in Bulletin d’études
indiennes (2010-2011) and “Pirla Panduga: Muharram practices
of the Deccan Weavers, their Migrations, Songs and Memories”
in Vijaya Ramaswamy (ed). Migrations in Medieval and Early
Colonial India. Routledge, 2016. He has also published articles
on cinematic representation in Walter Benjamin and the social
relation in Judith Butler and Michel Foucault and an article
on the Post-Sraffian debates on Ricardian theory of rent and
Marshallian Marginalism has appeared in the recent issue of
the European Journal of the History of Economic Thought.
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E-mail addresses
Guo-Quan Seng
[email protected]
Hassan S. Khalilieh
[email protected]
Kirsty Walker
[email protected]
Stephanie Jones
[email protected]
Santhosh Abraham
[email protected]
Léon Buskens
[email protected]
Nurfadzilah Yahaya
[email protected]
Gijs Kruijtzer
[email protected]
Fahad Bishara
[email protected]
Renisa Mawani
[email protected]
Nadeera Rupesinghe [email protected]
Naveen Kanalu
[email protected]
Elizabeth Lhost
[email protected]
Nathan Perl-Rosenthal [email protected]
Seán Donlan
[email protected]
Mahmood Kooria
[email protected]
Sanne Ravensbergen [email protected]
Joel Blecher
[email protected]
Stewart Motha
[email protected]
Nikitas Hatzimihail
[email protected]
Visakh Madhusoodanan [email protected]
Fachrizal Halim
[email protected]
Arthur Weststeijn
[email protected]
Byapti Sur
[email protected]
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Notes
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