Friday, October 26th, 2012 Extraordinary Law at a Colonial Frontier: State Prisoners and the East India Company, 1784-1860

Description

This paper discusses the historical relevance of an overlooked archive of special trials and courts martial of state prisoners to the genealogy of the modern security state. It examines the taxonomy of detention developed by the British East India Company at its colonial frontier through the prism of martial law and preventive arrest. The trials of rebels captured in insurrections and wars at the Company’s frontiers in the early nineteenth century in Southern Asia invariably provoked comment on the necessity of martial law, the applicability of military law to non-combatants, the classification of enemies and subjects, and the elaboration of statutory provisions for preventive arrest. As this paper will make clear, extraordinary laws derived from colonial wartime measures operated beyond the notion of exception and the suspension of habeas corpus. They were woven into the very fabric of colonial jurisprudence. By examining the ways in which military and civil law were breached and policed by invoking arguments of necessity, this paper will explore how the Company’s assertion of territorial sovereignty turned on the assertion of its sovereignty over life.

Bhavani Raman is assistant professor at the History Department, Princeton University where she teaches South Asian History. Her book on colonial practices of paperwork entitled, Document Raj: Scribes and Writing in Early Colonial South India is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press as part of the South Asia Across the Disciplines series. She is currently researching frontier jurisdiction in South and South East Asia in the early nineteenth century.