The history of Indians in colonial South Africa betrays a long history of settlement, from at least the mid-seventeenth century, regulated by inter-imperial spaces of negotiation, first via the regulation of religion and custom in the 1795–1814 period and then via the regulation of mobile laborers a century later in the high era of legal intervention from 1885–1914. During the latter period, Indians were still categorized as “Asiatic,” even though many Indians began to identify as Indians in the context of political protest against discrimination. In this essay, I argue that a history of law governing “Asiatics” in colonial South Africa reveals important processes of settler colonialism in the British Empire that situate Indians as settlers in a complex landscape of power. Because of their ever-increasing settlements and attachments to land, legal regimes sought to control their movement and residence. Through a brief review of early Indian migration into the Cape region from the mid-seventeenth century through the early nineteenth century assumption of power by the British Empire, I discuss how Indians, though still categorized in a blanket “Asiatic” category by the colonial state, as in previous time periods, were increasingly monitored and controlled because of their expanding settlements from 1885 to 1914. Such a process shows how Indians of South Africa fit into contemporary frameworks of settler colonialism, particularly those developed by Lorenzo Veracini, and the concept of an “exogenous others,” or settlers who were blocked from indigenization in the process of empire. If extended into larger histories of “settler colonies” in the British Empire, such a new vantage point will allow histories of the British Empire that transcend narrow strictures of race, ethnicity, or community.
Histories of Marxism in South Asia often focus on the great men of colonial Indian politics, such as M. N. Roy, who imagined political futures away from nation or identity, or narrowly on activists like Muzaffar Ahmad, the founder of the Communist Party of India, without consideration of the regional-historical and intellectual contexts out of which such activism and imaginations sprang. Using the Bengali Muslim context of the early twentieth century, this article examines how Muslim activists imagined their identity outside of and beyond normative frameworks such as nation or religious community. This article specifically analyses Samyabadi, a left-oriented journal published in Calcutta from 1922 to 1925, in the larger context of communist developments in Bengal and throughout India. The findings offer exciting support for new research approaches to regional and religious identity in late colonial South Asia.
As the debate over historical antecedents to contemporary forms of lex mercatoria suggests, the nature of legal authority appears to be changing into a less familiar, more pluralistic form, even as states struggle to reassert their power. In seeking to understand this transformation in—and decentering of—the modern state's authority, we consider the multiple sources of legal authority claimed by the East India Company (1600–1757) and the way in which it positioned its legal and political legitimacy in relation to multiple and often competing centers of power in India. This article proposes the notion that the hegemony of a centralized modern state belongs only to a narrow sliver of history, hiding a much deeper pluralism within global history. In so doing, this article sets the stage for a sustained consideration of the plural nature of authority in the waxing and waning phases of the modern state.
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