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SECTION M: CONSTITUTION-MAKING AND POLITICAL OBSERVATIONS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 December 2014

Extract

‘Republicanism in Asia’, 1952–1953

‘Constitutional issues in South Asia’, undated

‘Some Asian prime ministers’, 1955

‘Constitution-making in Arcady’, undated

‘Constitution-making’, undated

‘Magna Carta and constitutionalism in the Commonwealth’, 1964–196587

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Historical Society 2014 

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References

1 The Radical Programme (London, 1885) was a series of articles first published in the Fortnightly Review and overseen by the Liberal party politician Joseph Chamberlain which advocated radical reform in Britain, including land redistribution, disestablishment of the Church of England, free public education, and universal male suffrage. This quotation is taken from ‘Measures’, pp. 38–41.

2 A phrase used by Lytton Strachey in his biography of Queen Victoria, first published in 1921.

3 Stanley Baldwin (later Earl Baldwin of Bewdley), British Conservative Prime Minister, 1923–1924, 1924–1929, 1935–1937.

4 Harold Laski, British Labour politician; Professor at the London School of Economics, 1926–1950.

5 Bradlaugh, Charles, The Impeachment of the House of Brunswick (London, 1874)Google Scholar.

6 Hugh Dalton (later Baron Dalton), British Labour minister; Chancellor of the Exchequer, 1945–1947.

7 McHenry, Dean E., The Labour Party in Transition, 1931–1938 (London, 1938), p. 270Google Scholar.

8 Franklin D. Roosevelt, Democrat President of the United States of America, 1933–1945.

9 Jennings is referring to criticism of George V made by his former LSE colleague Laski in The Crisis and the Constitution (London, 1931).

10 A meeting of Commonwealth prime ministers where the key item on the agenda was India's decision to become a republic and the country's wish to remain in the Commonwealth.

11 D.S. Senanayake.

12 The agreement between the Kandyan Chiefs and the British to replace the Kandyan monarchy in the interior of Sri Lanka with the British one.

13 The year when universal suffrage had been introduced to the island.

14 Rudyard Kipling wrote many poems and stories of British India in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

15 Edmund Burke, sixteenth-century Irish-born political philosopher and English MP.

16 Walter Bagehot, nineteenth-century English political journalist.

17 A.V. Dicey, Venerian Professor of English Law at the University of Oxford, 1882–1909.

18 Henry Hallam, English constitutional historian.

19 William Stubbs, English constitutional historian.

20 Thomas Erskine May (later Baron Farnborough), Clerk of the House of Commons, 1871–1886; constitutional expert.

21 Sir William Anson, Liberal Unionist politician and constitutional expert.

22 Thomas Babington Macaulay (later Baron Macaulay), English historian and politician.

23 G.D.H. Cole, English political theorist.

24 Mohandas Karmarchand Gandhi, Indian political leader.

25 Sidney Webb (later Baron Passfield), British Labour minister; Secretary of State for the Colonies, 1929–1931.

26 This refers to the split in the Labour Party when Ramsay MacDonald and other Labour ministers were expelled from the party for ending the Labour Government and agreeing to form a National Government with the Conservative and Liberal parties.

27 George Nathanial Curzon (later Marquess Curzon of Kedleston), Viceroy of India, 1899–1905.

28 First published in 1885.

29 The more things change, the more they stay the same.

30 More commonly spelled ‘Ashoka’, this refers to the Indian emblem of four lions back to back on a circular object, which is a modern adaptation of the Mauryan Emperor Ashoka's emblem and is used as an official symbol of the Republic of India.

31 The national anthem of Sri Lanka.

32 The princely state of Hyderabad was annexed to the Indian Union by the Indian army in September 1948.

33 Goa was a Portuguese territory until it was annexed to the Indian Union by the Indian army in December 1961.

34 Osman Ali Khan, ruler and Nizam of Hyderabad, 1911–1948.

35 Sir Benegal N. Rau, Indian civil servant; constitutional adviser to the Constituent Assembly of India and Burma.

36 Sir Winston Churchill, British Prime Minister, 1940–1945 and 1951–1955.

37 For the ‘story’, see section H.

38 Actually 1951.

39 John Bright, British orator and Liberal minister; President of the Board of Trade, 1868–1871.

40 Sirimavo Bandaranaike, SLFP Prime Minister, 1960–1965, 1970–1972, and then again under the Republic of Sri Lanka, 1972–1977 and 1994–2000.

41 In the States Reorganisation Act, 1956, which majorly altered the state boundaries in an attempt to accommodate Indian plurality.

42 Jennings, Sir Ivor, Some Characteristics of the Indian Constitution – Being Lectures given in the University of Madras during March 1952 under the Sir Alladi Krishnaswami Aiyer Shashitaahdapoothi Endowment (Madras, 1953)Google Scholar.

43 See documents H1 and H2.

44 C.P. Snow's novel The Masters, published in his Strangers and Brothers series in 1951.

45 Keith B. Callard, author of scholarly books on Pakistan.

46 The Muslim religious community.

47 The last link in the chain of causation.

48 George Lansbury, British Labour Party leader, 1932–1935.

49 Suharwardy had affiliations with St Catherine's College, University of Oxford.

50 Prominent Sinhalese families in Colombo.

51 The highest native title and an office given by the British to selected elite Sri Lankan families.

52 Sir Solomon Dias Bandaranaike.

53 A caste group in India that is not within the Brahmin group to which the Nehrus belonged.

54 Ancient Hindu scriptures in Sanskrit.

55 Motilal Nehru, Indian lawyer and leading member of the Indian National Congress.

56 The protagonist of a satirical eighteenth-century song, who changes his beliefs to match the monarch of the day.

57 This is an astonishing error from Jennings as an expert on South Asia. Mahatma Gandhi was not related in any way to Nehru's son in-law Feroze Gandhi.

58 British honour of Knight Commander of the Most Eminent Order of the Indian Empire.

59 British honour of Knight Commander of the Most Exalted Order of the State of India.

60 Private secretary.

61 Gandhi's non-violent resistance philosophy.

62 Referring to the German annexation of the Sudetenland region from Czechoslovakia in 1938.

63 Portugal ruled the Indian enclave of Goa from 1510 until 1961, when the Indian Army annexed it after Portugal had refused offers to negotiate the territory's status peacefully.

64 British Overseas Airways Corporation.

65 A leading public school in England.

66 See documents H1 and H2.

67 Honourable Minister of Law.

68 Richard G. Senanayake, nephew of D.S. Senanayake and UNP minister; Minister of Trade and Commerce, 1952–1956.

69 Sir Francis Molamure, Speaker of the Ceylon House of Representatives, 1947–1951.

70 Don Richard Wijewardene, press baron and ally of the UNP.

71 Adeline, Lady Molamure, wife of Sir Francis Molamure; first female member of the pre-independence legislature; member of the Senate afterwards.

72 The highest Sinhalese caste group.

73 A leading school for boys in Colombo.

74 James Griffiths, British Labour minister; Secretary of State for the Colonies, 1950–1951.

75 Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge.

76 Unfortunately the manuscript ends here and does not continue to cover, as Jennings promises, Dudley Senanayake and Sir John Kotelawala.

77 Kwame Nkrumah, first Prime Minister of the independent realm of Ghana, 1957–1960; President of the Republic of Ghana, 1960–1966.

78 The Malayan leader Tunku Abdul Rahman.

79 The Oxford degree of Philosophy, Politics, and Economics.

80 Sir Andrew Caldecott, Governor of Ceylon, 1937–1944.

81 In the United Kingdom.

82 Julius Nyerere, first President of Tanzania, 1964–1985.

83 See p. 204, n. 14.

84 Arthur Henderson, British Labour minister; Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, 1929–1931.

85 Philip Snowden (later Viscount Snowden), British Labour minister; Chancellor of the Exchequer, 1924 and 1929–1931.

86 In 1953 the British Government established a constitutional commission under Sir George Rendel that reviewed Singapore's constitutional position and recommended a legislative assembly with an elected majority and a ministerial form of government modelled on Westminster.

87 In order to remain consistent, all legal and legislative references are made in the historic way that Jennings wrote them and have not been modified to conform with modern usage and referencing. At the invitation of the UK Government's Central Office of Information, Jennings published a slim volume for public consumption entitled Magna Carta and its Influence in the World Today (London, 1965). The following is very different from that volume.

88 A historical term meaning a charter in which a grantor confirmed inspecting and examining an earlier charter.

89 Sir Edward Coke, English jurist; Chief Justice, 1613–1616.

90 The Institutes were a set of legal treatises by Coke published from 1628. The second was formally titled The Second Part of the Institutes of the Laws of England; Containing the Exposition of Many Ancient and Other Statutes.

91 A collection of statutes issued since Magna Carta and published in various editions from the early nineteenth century onwards.

92 A record of all statutes from Magna Carta onwards, compiled between 1810 and 1828.

93 An abridged collection of statutes. It was actually published in 1950: Drayton, Robert (ed.), The Statutes, third revised edition (London, 1950)Google Scholar.

94 John Selden, seventeenth-century English jurist and scholar.

95 Matthew Paris, thirteenth-century English Benedictine monk and chronicler.

96 A form of taxation related to military service to the Crown.

97 Sir William Blackstone, eighteenth-century English jurist; first Venerian Professor of English Law at the University of Oxford.

98 Blackstone, William, The Great Charter and Charter of the Forest, with the Other Authentic Instruments: to Which is Prefixed an Introductory Discourse, Containing the History of the Charters (Oxford, 1759)Google Scholar.

99 Fabrigas v. Mostyn (1774), 20 St. Tr. 81, 187; R. v. Picton (1812), 30 St. Tr. 225.

100 Fabrigas v. Mostyn, loc. cit.

101 Personal laws applying to Sri Lankan Tamils in the Northern Province of Sri Lanka.

102 It is unclear what episode Jennings is referring to here. It is possible that he is pointing to a case from the British colonies.

103 A text by the fifteenth-century English judge Sir Thomas Littleton on property law.

104 Seizure of property.

105 R. v. Halliday [1917] A.C. 260.

106 Liversidge v. Anderson [1942] A.C. 206.

107 Authoritative text still used across Commonwealth countries on parliamentary procedures, rules, etc. Many editions have been published since the first in 1844.

108 An Anglo-Indian colloquialism meaning banditry.

109 Eamon de Valera, Irish political leader who agitated for independence; Taoiseach (Prime Minister) of the Republic of Ireland, 1937–1948, 1951–1954, 1957–1959; President, 1959–1973.

110 Chin Peng was a Malayan Communist Party leader who led guerrilla attacks during the Malayan Emergency.

111 Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah was a Kashmiri political leader who attacked princely rule in Jammu and Kashmir and defended the region's interests. He later became its Chief Minister after the Partition of India.

112 Jomo Kenyatta, Kenyan political leader who agitated for independence; first Prime Minister of independent Kenya, 1963–1964; President, 1964–1978.

113 This refers to movements for independence from the Republic of India of the Naga tribes in north-eastern India.

114 John Hampden, English politician who attacked the rule of Charles I during the 1620s and 1630s.

115 John Pym, English politician who attacked the rule of Charles I during the 1620s and 1630s.

116 Dicey, A.V., Law of the Constitution (London, 1885)Google Scholar.

117 In 1949.

118 Subsection.

119 Jennings is referring to Dicey, A.V., A Leap in the Dark or Our New Constitution (London, 1893), pp. 84116Google Scholar.

120 Jennings notes ‘The repeal was held to be valid in Moore v. Attorney-General for the Irish Free State, [1935] A.C. 484.’

121 John Simon (later Viscount Simon), British Liberal and National minister; Lord Chancellor, 1940–1945.

122 1946 saw the ‘Cabinet Mission’ to India to discuss the transfer of power and the form of independent India.

123 See Jennings, Sir Ivor, Some Characteristics of the Indian Constitution: being lectures given in the University of Madras during March 1952 under the Sir Alladi Krishnaswami Aiyer Shashitaahdapoothi Endowment (Madras, 1953)Google Scholar.

124 Minorities such as Indian and Pakistani residents and the Ceylon Tamils did in fact take the Ceylon state to court (including the Privy Council) on noted occasions from 1948 onwards for discrimination on grounds of citizenship and language rights under s. 29 of the constitution, which Jennings drafted. The courts did not find in favour of these groups. 1956 was the year of the Sinhala Only Act, which made Sinhalese the sole official language. This was not seen by the courts or Parliament as contravening the constitution.

125 R. v. British Coal Corporation, [1935] A.C. 500.

126 Canada abolished further appeals to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in 1949.

127 R. v. Ibralebbe, [1964] A.C. 900, a case from Ceylon.

128 Malaysia abolished all appeals to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in late 1984.

129 Jennings is referring to Dicey, A Leap in the Dark, pp. 94–102.

130 Adegbenro v. Akintola, [1963] A.C. 614.

131 Blackstone, William, Commentaries on the Laws of England (London, 1765–1769), IVGoogle Scholar.

132 Ibid., I.

133 Christian wrote this as a footnote in his ‘Notes and additions’ to volume I of Blackstone's Commentaries.

134 ‘Preserve, I beseech ye, O Romans, this liberty, which your ancestors have left ye as an inheritance.’