This is a repository copy of Review of "From the Colonial to the Contemporary: Images, Iconography, Memories and Performances of Law in India's High Courts" by Rahela Khorakiwala.
This article interrogates the relationship between registration, the professions, and modern crises, using the Medical Register as an illustration. We start by surveying briefly the history of the regulation of health workers in the United Kingdom to contextualise the mechanisms of registers and registration. Under the initial model of registration, one could be in or out of the ‘principal list’, and various routes enabled health practitioners to obtain full registration and its ensuing privileges. That model still influences ordinary understandings of registration, but the paper identifies other categories of registration emerging in the middle of the 20th century, starting with the international crisis of the Second World War and up until the recent coronavirus pandemic. Drawing on historical and contemporary work, we show that there are multiple ways one can be on the Register, with some more precarious than others. In turn, we debunk the idea of the Register as a document immune from political choices and instead shed light on the details of its intimate engagement with modern forms of governance.
The position of the territorially sovereign nation-state as the fundamental building block of the contemporary world order has come under increasing challenge. Historians have long focused on social, cultural, economic, and technological factors to examine the constructed nature of the nation-state. In this article, I explore the role of law, and specifically the concept of sovereignty, in the creation of the unified spatial entity constituting the nation-state. I focus in particular on the decolonisation of South Asia and analyse legal arguments made in two international disputes (over Hyderabad and the river Indus) to understand the process through which the Indian nation-state came into being.
The article examines the relationship between colonialism and international law by focusing on late nineteenth century debates surrounding the sovereignty of the “princely states” of colonial South Asia. The princely states were ruled by indigenous rulers and were not considered to be British territory, but remained subject to British “influence;” as a result, there were numerous controversies over their legal status. During the course of jurisdictional disputes, a variety of interested players - British politicians, colonial officials, international lawyers, rulers and advisors of princely states - engaged in debates over the idea of sovereignty to resolve questions of legal status, the extent of rights and powers, and to construct a political order that supported their interests and aspirations. I focus on legal texts written by British international lawyers and colonial officials as well as material relating to two jurisdictional disputes (one between the state of Travancore and the British Government and another between the state of Baroda and the British Government) to trace two versions of sovereignty that were articulated in late nineteenth century South Asia - unitary and divisible. In doing so, I argue that international law, and the doctrine of sovereignty in particular, became the shared language for participants to debate political problems and a key forum for the negotiation of political power.
This chapter examines constructions of sovereignty by the British government and the princely states in the aftermath of the 1857 rebellion. Although late nineteenth-century international lawyers limited the applicability of international law to civilized European states, colonial officials in South Asia blamed the civilizing mission for the uprising and built a mode of governance that capitalized on relationships with local rulers. This chapter outlines how this governance structure was facilitated by Henry Maine’s definition of sovereignty as divisible and a question of fact. British political officials relied on divisible sovereignty to build a system of precedent through which decisions made by the British government in relation to one state were made applicable to all states. The divisibility of sovereignty enabled the British to entrench their supremacy by claiming that the states were both subject to British paramountcy and allies in the imperial project. In two jurisdictional disputes—the attempts by Travancore and Baroda to exercise criminal jurisdiction over European British subjects in the state and over telegraph lines traversing state territory respectively—the princes and their advisors advocated a different version of sovereignty. They claimed that sovereignty was absolute, exclusive, and territorial to argue that the princely state was the sole sovereign authority within its territory. They used this conceptualization of sovereignty to defend the existence of the states against the increasingly intrusive nature of British colonialism and to forge centralized bureaucracies to curb the power of local aristocrats who undercut the authority of the princes within their states.
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