Table of Contents

Introduction: The New Legal Histories of Empire Part I – Framing Empire: People and Institutions The Rule of Law and the Perils of Judicial Tenure in Britain’s Caribbean Colonies, 1800-1868 To Sit or not to Sit: The Debate over the Inclusion of Indigenous Judges in the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council Cultural expertise and social vision: Justice Amir Ali’s interpretation of Indian tradition A Judicial Maverick: John Gorrie at large in the Victorian Empire Part II – Laws Benjamin Knowles v. Rex: Judging Murder, Race, and Respectability from Colonial Ghana to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, 1928-30 Inventing Extraordinary Criminality: A Study of Criminalization by the Calcutta Goondas Act Burton’s Draft 1838 Act for the Amelioration of the Aboriginal Natives (NSW) A Single Site for Modernising Nineteenth Century Law: India and the UK Part III – Engagements "Empires, Law, and First Nations in Northern North America, 1500–1760 "Understanding "Chinese Customs": the Irish Judges and the Sinchew Disputes in the Straits Settlements, 1830s–1870s Translating the Hedaya: Colonial Foundations of Islamic Law Legacies of Empires: Race and Labor Contracts in the Upper Mississippi River Valley, 1808–1837 Part IV – Legacies Slavery, Villeinage, and the Law in Imperial Britain "Macaulay: Liberal Imperialist or Progressive Law Reformer? The India Penal Code and Labour Mobilities of Law: Indigenous Specters and Indian Migration, 1914 A Slave Trade Jurisdiction: Attempts against the slave trade and the making of a space of rights in the Arabo-Persian Gulf, the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea (1820-1900)

About the Author

Shaunnagh Dorsett is Professor of Law at the University of Technology, Sydney. Her work focuses on Crown-Indigenous relations in colonial New South Wales / New Zealand and sovereignty formation in the first half of the nineteenth century.


John McLaren is Emeritus Professor of Law, University of Victoria, British Columbia. His research interests lie in the field of Canadian and Comparative Colonial Legal History. He has written widely and edited several books of essays in those fields.