Chair: Dr Amanda Chisholm, Senior Lecturer in Security Studies / Researcher in Gender and Security

Speaker: Dr Mark Condos, Historian interested in the intersections between violence, race, and law within the British and French empires

Discussant: Dr Alastair McClure, Historian of modern South Asia and the British Empire

 

Giorgio Agamben has described the First World War and its immediate aftermath as a crucial turning point in the history of ‘states of exception’. However, Agamben’s now axiomatic formulation of the state of exception is problematic when we consider the colonial world. As various scholars have pointed out, Agamben’s framework is inherently Eurocentric and fails to take into account how racial difference rendered colonial rule an inherently authoritarian and anti-democratic enterprise from the outset.

The blurring of executive, legislative, and judicial powers that Agamben identifies with the state of exception were, in fact, integral, systemic features of colonial power. Using British India as a case study, the paper discussed in this seminar seeks to re-orient our understanding of states of emergency away from the framework of the exception in order to consider how they may be more usefully considered as general techniques of colonial power. In so doing, it argues that rather than representing a point of rupture or change, the First World War simply offered an opportunity for the British colonial state to draw upon and expand an already extensive repertoire of coercive executive and legal practices that had been central to colonial control since the early nineteenth century.

 

Biography:

I am an historian interested in the intersections between violence, race, and law within the British and French empires, with a particular focus on India and Algeria. I completed both my BA and MA at Queen’s University in Canada, and in 2013 received my PhD from the University of Cambridge, where I worked under the late Professor Sir Christopher Bayly. Prior to joining King’s College London in January of 2020, I held a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellowship at Queen Mary, University of London between 2014 and 2017, and subsequently worked as a Lecturer in Imperial and Global History between 2017 and 2020.

My previous work has examined the relationship between militarism, violence, and state-building in colonial Punjab and the North-West Frontier of India; the important role of colonial anxieties and fear in justifying colonial violence; as well as the legal and discursive histories of colonial understandings of ‘fanatical’ anti-colonial resistance. Currently, I am working on a number of different projects, including a study of the commemorative history of the little-known Ajnala Massacre of 1857; another piece about an abortive mutiny and coup d’état against British rule in southern India, allegedly orchestrated by deposed Indian princes; as well as a longer, comparative book project that explores how concepts of prestige, dignity, and honour informed imperial practices of retributive violence, and the ways that different imperial powers attempted to justify these within legal, moral, and other normative frameworks.

 

Discussant biography:

Dr Alastair McClure is a historian of modern South Asia and the British Empire. His research focuses largely on the relationship between violence, law and sovereignty in the context of nineteenth and twentieth century India and the Indian Ocean world. His current publications tackle components of this wider question through the history of royal amnesty and corporal punishment. Before joining the University of Hong Kong, Dr McClure completed fellowships at McGill University and the University of Chicago. His research has been supported by grants from the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the British Academy.

Currently Dr McClure is working on his first book project which examines the history of criminal law in colonial India from 1857-1922. This focuses on the underlying tension between the colonial state’s reliance on arguments of exceptionalism and force on one hand, and due process within a codified universal legal regime on the other. Individual chapters explore the codification of criminal law in India, judicial discretion in murder trials, the introduction of legislation for corporal punishment, forgiveness and mercy, the reinstatement of sedition laws, and the trials of Indian nationalists such as Mahatma Gandhi.

Dr McClure's new project examines deportation and repatriation in the Indian Ocean. Framed around the question of who could be moved, and where they could be moved to, this project draws on legal cases thrown up from subaltern actors at the social and geographic peripheries of empire.

 

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