The Historiography of Difference

Law and History Review

Volumn 23, Issue 3, 2005, Pages 685-695

  Parker, Kunal M ^a  

^a CLEVELAND STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 85011514378     PISSN: 07382480     EISSN: 19399022     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0738248000000602     Document Type: Article

References (13)

1. There are simply too many references to supply here. If beginners were to restrict themselves to historians alone, they might consult the work of various scholars explicitly associated with the Subaltern Studies project. These include-to name only the few best known in the Western academy-Shahid Amin, David Arnold, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Partha Chatterjee, Ranajit Guha, David Hardiman, Sudipta Kaviraj, Gyandendra Pandey, and Gyan Prakash. The reader could also consult the very widely received work (in certain cases the early work) of Arjun Appadurai, Homi Bhabha, Bernard Cohn, Nicholas Dirks, Gayatri Spivak, and Sara Suleri, some of whom have also been associated with Subaltern Studies.
2. The fact that Mukherjee's and Kolsky's articles fit so comfortably within this scholarly tradition reveals something, first and foremost, about the state of colonial Indian legal history (this is emphatically not intended as a criticism of either article). Unlike American legal history, which has been driven for many decades by the efforts of scholars who are legally trained and have appointments on law faculties, colonial Indian legal history remains the product of the efforts of historians. As such, it has been thematized in keeping with the broader thematizations of Indian history. Not surprisingly, in recent years, the result has been a legal history plotted along axes of difference-for example, race, religion, caste, gender, sexuality-that pays very little attention to the quiddity of law. To my knowledge, there are no systematic book-length scholarly studies of the history of core public and private legal ideas, let alone any attempt to link such ideas to the larger sweep of Indian history.
3. Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997); Lauren Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
4. Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures, 257.
5. Law and Colonial Cultures., 258.
6. Guha, Dominance without Hegemony, ix.
7. Uday Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 199), 212-13.
8. Jeremy Bentham, “Essay on the Influence of Time and Place in Matters of Legislation,” in The Works of Jeremy Bentham, ed. John Bowring (New York: Russell & Russell, 1962), 1:177.
9. Mehta, Liberalism and Empire, 214.
10. Mukherjee, “Justice, War, and the Imperium,” Law and History Review 23 (2005): 591.
11. Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).
12. See David Lieberman, The Province of Legislation Determined: Legal Theory in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) for an account of Mansfield.
13. Bentham, “Essay on the Influence of Time,” 174.