Speaker: Professor Michael Lobban, Professor of Legal History at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Speaker: Professor Michael Lobban, Professor of Legal History at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Exploring themes explored in his book Imperial Incarceration, Professor Lobban will discuss the perceptions of martial law in the later nineteenth century, and the different uses made of it during the Boer war, when its main targets were white British subjects, and the Zulu rebellion of 1906, when its targets were Africans.

Although never used in mainland Britain, martial law was resorted to on many occasions in the nineteenth century throughout the British Empire. Its use generated extensive debates about the nature of martial law, both in the aftermath of its use in Ceylon in 1848 and in Jamaica in 1865. In 1867 the Colonial Office set out guidelines for colonial governors who needed to resort to the use of martial law. Nonetheless, the precise nature of the relationship between martial law and civil law remained unsettled at the end of the century, when the Boer war broke out.

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About the speaker

Michael Lobban is Professor of Legal History at the LSE. His work examines the history of legal thought in the common law tradition and the history of English since 1700. More recently, his work has also focussed on the history of private law in England and the development of the law of contract and torts, and bankruptcy and insolvency.

He is the author and co-author of numerous books, including The Oxford History of the Laws of England (with W R Cornish et al., Oxford 2010), A History of the Philosophy of Law in the Common Law World, 1600-1900 (edited with E Pattaro, 2007), White Man’s Justice: South African Political Trials in the Black Consciousness Era (Clarendon Press, 1996), and The Common Law and English Jurisprudence, 1760-1850 (Clarendon, 1991). His most recent work, Imperial Incarceration: Detention without Trial in the Making of British Colonial Africa (Cambridge, 2021) examines the widespread use of detention without trial throughout Britain’s nineteenth and early twentieth century imperial possessions in Africa. In October 2022, Professor Lobban will be taking up a new position at All Soul’s College, Oxford.