Colonial Legal History

The article investigates modern law in its colonial career as it consisted in two paradoxical itineraries. Colonial rule developed under the auspices of governing through modern positive
law as it claimed independence from religion and the administration. But the colonies also surfaced as zones of lawlessness, administrative measures, arbitrariness and
excessive exceptions. Rather than posit the second itinerary as exceptional to the general first one, notwithstanding how constitutive the exception may be of the rule, this article
examines a number of legalities that exemplified these two itineraries in colonial Egypt and theorizes them as co-existing modalities of juridical power that shared similar objectives
and fields of intervention. In particular, under historical investigation are legalities that managed agricultural labor through penal/administrative measures. It is argued that
these legalities co-existed with positive and liberal legal institutions. Agricultural legalities were “pervasive legalities,” enhancing modern positive law’s production of a gapless legal
order that aspired to capture limitless terrains of social life. This legal history reveals that the hallmark of modern colonial law did not consist in substituting a regime of separation of powers and codification for that of pre-colonial fusion or administrative legalities. Rather, the historical achievement of modern law consisted in its “elastic positivism,” that is to say, in wedding positive law to pervasive legalities as both served to dominate the social: the first from the independent terrain of codified law and the second from the material domains of social life. This hallmark of gaplessness and pervasiveness is what made modern law fit for colonial rule.

A study of the profile of the average ribbon transportee to Tasmania undertaken by investigating those convicts who advised the Tasmanian authorities that they had been transported for offences relating to “ribbonism”. The University of Tasmania's John Williams Irish Convict Data Base (ICDB) yielded thirty names when explored for data using the term ribbon in the offence heading. This included offences such as “having ribbon papers in his possession”, “ribbonman”, etc. Of the thirty names produced, ten had been transported for stealing ribbons. The find was thus limited to twenty convicts.

This article applies a history of knowledge perspective to interwar ILO efforts to produce generalized international instruments for governing migrant labor. The historical analysis explores what it meant in the interwar context to devise "an international common law of the emigrant." It focuses particular attention on the process through which juridical techniques formalized a distinction between "migration for employment" and "migratory movements of indigenous workers." Foregrounding the constructed nature of these categories highlights the underlying race-based notions that informed interwar ILO standard-setting frameworks. More broadly, tracing the knowledge making processes through which seemingly objective categorical distinctions have been constructed and reconstructed opens space for questioning and potentially rethinking the functionally differentiated normative frameworks through which global policymaking approaches human mobility today.

This study examines the mechanisms that African women employed to accumulate wealth and property during the nineteenth century. After the ban on slave exports in 1836, West Central Africans looked for new economic activities and shifted their focus and energy to the trade in commodities as legitimate commerce expanded in Benguela. In the process, African women achieved new social and economic positions in the colonial setting, accumulating dependents and goods. The concentration of dependents, including enslaved ones, clustered wealth in fewer hands and altered notions of land access and rights. Primary sources reveal consumption patterns that suggest that property was accumulated in different ways, and that such accumulation spread far into the interior. This article emphasizes African women’s role as active agents of change on the coast and in the interior of Benguela during this time of economic transformation, making extensive use of kinship, affinity and economic networks that already existed.