Legal Histories of Empire

The Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory, based in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, is delighted to offer a bursary scheme for scholars who wish to attend and deliver a talk at the Legal Histories of Empires conference and who are currently based in the Global South. The Institute is promoting research on, among others, legal transfers in the common law world, where the development of law on the Indian subcontinent is of particular interest, and the legal history of Ibero-America.

The Institute offers a bursary to attend the conference comprised of: flights to and from the conference, the registration fee, accommodation, a daily stipend, and the expenses associated with a visa application. Applicants must be currently based at an institution in one of the G77 Group of countries at the United Nations.

In order to apply for the scholarship, candidates will be asked to submit the following information: a statement of interest, the proposed topic to be delivered, and a short CV (no more than 3 pages). Applications should be sent to vogenauer@lhlt.mpg.de by 31 October 2021. Acceptances will be sent around mid-December.

More information about the Legal Histories of Empires Conference 2022 can be found here, where you can also subscribe for email updates.

The organising committee is delighted to announce the keynote panel for the conference.

Title:

Anglicisation of and through law in British America, Ireland, and India, c.1550-1800

Speakers:

Jane Ohlmeyer, Erasmus Smith’s Professor of Modern History, Trinity College Dublin

Richard J Ross, David C. Baum Professor of Law and Professor of History, University of Illinois

Philip Stern, Associate Professor of History, Duke University

More information about the upcoming conference can be found on our website, where you may also subscribe for email updates.

The organising committee is delighted to confirm the re-scheduled dates for the Conference.

When: 29 June-1 July 2022

Where: Maynooth University, Ireland

What: Beyond the Pale: Legal Histories on the Edges of Empires

CFP: Out in the next week or two.

Accommodation and Registration: We will be providing information about accommodation on this website well before the event. Accommodation will be available on campus and at a number of hotels in the area.

What about Covid-19? At present our expectation is that this will be a hybrid conference. We hope that by late June 2022 some of our presenters will be able to attend in person. We also hope to offer options for those who cannot attend. Things may change (particularly with the ‘in person’ part). We will be responsive to the changing circumstances and to health advice. And we will keep you all informed.

Questions: Email  Shaunnagh Dorsett (Shaunnagh.Dorsett@uts.edu.au) or Lyndsay Campbell (lcampbe@ucalgary.ca)

To do now? If you have not already, sign up on the right (at lhbe.org) for email notifications. We will not spam you. We will let you know only what you need to know when you need to know it!

Join us for the second of several symposia planned for 2020 and 2021 for Legal Histories of Empire.

Our speakers:

Lisa Ford: ‘The King’s Colonial Peace: Variable subjecthood and the transformation of empire’

This paper is drawn from my forthcoming book, The King’s Peace: Empire and Order in the British Empire. The book uses colonial peacekeeping as a lens through which to examine the shifting parameters of crown prerogative in Empire in the Age of Revolutions. This paper will argue that the legal vulnerability of (and often threats to order posed by) a diverse array of subjects – formerly French Catholics in Quebec, Caribbean slaves and NSW convicts – both prompted and justified the unravelling of the very idea of the freeborn Englishman that had been mobilised by protestant Britons in pre-revolutionary America.

Lisa Ford is Professor of History at the University of New South Wales, Australia. Her major publications include Settler Sovereignty: Jurisdiction and Indigenous People in America and Australia, 1788-1836 (2010) which won the Littleton-Griswold Prize (American Historical Association); the Thomas J. Wilson Prize (Harvard University Press); and the Premiers History Award (NSW). She is also co-author of Rage for Order: The British Empire and the Origins of International Law, 1800-1850 (co-authored with Lauren Benton, 2016) and author of The King’s Peace, which will be published by Harvard later this year. Ford is currently leading a collaborative project funded by the Australian Research Council exploring the role of commissions of inquiry sent throughout the British Empire in the 1820s on which subject she hopes to lead author a book manuscript this year. She also holds a four-year ARC Future Fellowship, during which she will explore the changing use of martial law in the British Empire from the late eighteenth century until 1865.

Jessica Hinchy: ‘Child Removal and the Colonial Governance of the Family: Hijra and “Criminal Tribe” Households in North India, c. 1865-1900’

Historians have primarily examined colonial child removal projects in settler colonial contexts. Yet from 1865, the colonial government in north India forcibly removed children from criminalised communities. Child separation began in the households of gender non-conforming people labelled ‘eunuchs,’ particularly Hijras, and eventually extended to socially marginalised people designated as ‘criminal tribes,’ especially Sansiyas. First, what does a comparison of these child removal schemes tell us about the colonial governance of the family? Patrilineal, conjugal and reproductive household models marginalised Hijras and Sansiyas in differing ways, while the category of ‘child’ was contingently defined. Child separation was attempted to varying ends, including both elimination and assimilation. Yet often, the colonial state could not sustain such intensified forms of intimate governance in the face of resistance from households. Nor could officials simply determine removed children’s futures. Second, what does child removal suggest about the making of colonial law? When children were initially removed from Hijra and Sansiya households, officials admitted that ‘the law may have been somewhat strained,’ since existing laws did not provide police or magistrates with legal powers to separate these children. The Sansiya child removal project, for instance, prompted debates about colonial legal exceptions and the ‘legality’ of the colonial state’s practices among colonial officials and Indian and European non-officials.

Jessica Hinchy is an Assistant Professor of History at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. She researches the history of gender, sexuality, households and family in colonial north India. In 2019, Cambridge University Press published her first monograph, Governing Gender and Sexuality in Colonial India: The Hijra, c. 1850-1900. Her research has also appeared in Modern Asian Studies, Gender & History and Asian Studies Review, among other journals.

The event will take place by zoom on Friday 5 March (or Thursday 4 March, depending on your timezone – see below). Please register here (via Eventbrite) to attend.

Timezones:

Sydney @ 12.30 pm on 5 March

Singapore @ 9.30 am on 5 March

Auckland @ 2.30 pm on 5 March

New Delhi @ 7.00 am on 5 March

London/Dublin @ 1.30 am on 5 March

Nairobi @ 4.30 am on 5 March

Vancouver @ 5.30 pm on 4 March

New Haven/Toronto @ 8.30 pm on 4 March