Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought: Colonialism, Post-Colonialism, and Legal Theory
Author(s)
Merry, Sally Engle
Abstract
Law has played a critical role in the expansion of European colonial control over Africa, Asia, and the Pacific in the last three centuries, leaving a complex legacy in the post-colonial world. Recent scholarship in the anthropology of colonialism considers the ways in which colonizers came to interpret subjugated peoples as “others” in relation to themselves and the ways in which the colonized constructed oppositional and resistant identities. What can we learn about the nature of law from colonial and post-colonial practices? What were the uses of law both in defining the subjugated as lawless and in legitimating colonial rule? How did law in the colonial context rationalize the violence of capitalist expansion? In what ways did colonized groups create their own law in forms of popular justice or reject the law altogether? Case studies will focus on British and American colonialism in Africa, India, and the Pacific.
