LAW AND IMPERIALISM: CRIMINALITY AND CONSTITUTION IN COLONIAL INDIA AND VICTORIAN ENGLAND docx

[...]... types in colonial India, and their equivalent form 8 Law and Imperialism in Victorian England, to offer insights and provide a piece of the jigsaw in the continuing debate on modernity, of criminal law, and of postcolonialism The Beginnings: Chapters and Mapping the Territory In order to understand the dynamics of colonial and imperial identities, Chapter 2 lays out the theoretical contributions in assembling... Criminals Act of 1869 in Victorian England, the Criminal Tribes Act of 187133 in colonial India 12 Law and Imperialism was articulated and reified to contain many itinerant tribes and castes that posed a threat to Western identity Dangerousness, nomadism and vagrancy were the defining features The criminal types in India expand the construction and reveal the similarities in legal reification, in containment,... between those above and those below, both in England and in India The West’s strategy of difference further resulted in constructing a sub-strata of the dangerous and criminal class from the ethnic 24 Law and Imperialism minorities within that class Internal processes were extended externally to colonial India, and internally to England, with the same objectives Difference: Ethnicity and Identities The... accounts converge in this discourse, articulating the experiences of those defined as subordinate strata, to further our understanding of the historical emergence of criminal laws, the conditions of its operation and limits This is an interdisciplinary project that takes the form of bringing criminal justice history back into the history of colonial law and order in India This practice illuminates one of... undermine social stability.7 Victorian law, both in the metropolis and in colonial India, aimed to contain these emerging threats and to affirm unequal statuses Here the operative role of the law is to preserve those identities Hence, the legal judicial reasonings and its processes had a structural function in stabilising the relationships between social unequals in the metropolis and in imperial India. .. Thompson and the more recent Subaltern studies, interpret the specificity of crime and punishment practices from a particular reading of the data on criminal justice history in England and Wales, and also in colonial India Social conflict and social relations can, in effect, be ‘read off ’ from the history of criminal law and of its application Integral to that work is an emphasis on the biases in the... similarity in the constitution of dangerous groups in Victorian England and in imperial India Drawing on the body of overlapping critical legal theory, from revisionist criminal justice history, from postcolonial theory and from social constructionism, the similarities between the two domains can be explained in a comparable way Imperial tensions found a voice through the law, and these efforts at containment... structures in the metropolis The constitution of ‘dangerous’ groups in colonial India was influenced by parallel Imperial Miasma 15 developments within Victorian England The colonial construction of ‘dangerous’ groups, which gave rise to the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871 in India, reflected similar tensions and anxieties which gave rise to the Habitual Criminals Act of 1869 in the metropolis In sum, the insistent... practice of suttee,26 (widow-burning), of the killing of girls by upper-caste Brahmins,27 (especially infanticide) and of criminal tribes unreformable by virtue of their inherited criminality, prompted and justified imperial fears of contamination both in India and at home,28 in the metropolis In colonial India, appropriate differentiation was measured on an assumed continuum of progress Imperial stability... the ‘criminal,’ and the ‘savage’ to exclude its colonial subjects Identities, far from being stable in their construction, are inherently unstable, and remain forever in an ambivalent relationship to the thing being constructed and those doing the construction Critical legal studies furnish three central insights In the context of the modernization of the common and criminal law of Westminster, and essentially . Jhala www.pickeringchatto.com/empires LAW AND IMPERIALISM: CRIMINALITY AND CONSTITUTION IN COLONIAL INDIA AND VICTORIAN ENGLAND  Preeti Nijhar  PICKERING. class="bi x0 y0 w1 h1" alt="" LAW AND IMPERIALISM: CRIMINALITY AND CONSTITUTION IN COLONIAL INDIA AND VICTORIAN ENGLAND Empires in Perspective Series Editors: