Trials of Sovereignty : Mercy, Violence, and the Making of Criminal Law in British India, 1857-1922 / Alastair McClure.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

McClure, Alastair, author.

Series:

Studies in legal history

Studies in Legal History Series

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Criminal law--India--History.

Criminal law.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xiii, 368 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, England : Cambridge University Press, [2024]

Summary:

Trials of Sovereignty offers the first legal history of mercy and discretion in nineteenth and twentieth-century India. Through a study of large-scale amnesties, the prerogative powers of pardon, executive commutation, and judicial sentencing practices, Alastair McClure argues that discretion represented a vital facet of colonial rule. In a bloody penal order, officials and judges consistently offered reduced sentences and pardons for select subjects, encouraging others to approach state institutions and confer the colonial state with greater legitimacy. Mercy was always a contested expression of sovereign power that risked exposing colonial weakness. This vulnerability was gradually recognized by colonial subjects who deployed a range of legal and political strategies to interrogate state power and question the lofty promises of British colonial justice. By the early twentieth century, the decision to break the law and reject imperial overtures of mercy had developed into a crucial expression of anticolonial politics

Contents:

Forgetting war and punishing crime

The peace : the Queen's proclamation and the politics of forgiveness

The code : judges, juries, and punishing difference

Discretion, the death penalty, and the criminal trial

Pardons and scaffolds

Tilak's radical innocence : mercy, sedition, and the state trial

Gandhi's guilt and the return of war

Notes:

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 20 Nov 2024).

Description based on print version record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781009553520

1009553526

9781009553506

100955350X

9781009553490

1009553496