Introduction: From Fragments to an Empire

The literature on the relationship between Victorian England and imperial India is growing with a welcome contribution from Subaltern Study scholars. The latter increasingly emphasize the dynamics, the bilateral relationship between the two societies. Previous assumptions of the passive role of indigenous peoples in those processes have been overturned by varied empirical studies. Scholars are increasingly turning their gaze to questions of empire, colonialism and post-colonialism, in order to provide an understanding of imperialism, and to the dynamics of imperialist technologies to the colonial project. This book adds to that body of literature by examining the intimate relationship between law and imperialism, in which two case studies of legal similarity and difference, are offered here.

In Law and Imperialism, we consider the marked reduction of the legal status of the non-Western, by examining the active contribution of both the colonials and the colonizers, to changes at the imperial centre. The growth of Empire was not a one-way process in which British agencies constructed Indian society in their own image. Rarely has there been serious discussion about the role of India itself, which made its own significant impact on British structures, culture, discourses and behaviours, than a previous generation of historians acknowledged.

The trigger for the development of such a historical view has not been a sudden revelation, a paradigmatic breakthrough, but the accumulation of apparently significant insights.