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In this theoretically rigorous and historically grounded study, Faisal Chaudhry convincingly shows how the rule of laws about landed property under Company Raj was transformed into a new normative conception of the law itself after the inauguration of Crown Raj in 1858. He skillfully places colonial India in the wider context of the global evolution of classical legal thought. He has brilliant chapters on the making of the new law of contract and jurisprudential innovation on marriages in the 1860s and 1870s. The re-definition of sovereignty in a more unitary direction can be seen to be matched by the establishment of a qualitatively new legal regime during these decades.  

Chaudhry’s South Asia is a brilliant rereading of the legal history of nineteenth century India under British rule.  Chaudhry shows that both before and after the shift from Company to Crown in 1857, the  legal consciousness informing the creation of new law changed continuously in ways that were as important or more important than changes in legal substance.  A highly original and deeply researched investigation of the way law did and didn’t travel from the metropole and was transformed in the process.  An important contribution to jurisprudence as well as to comparative law and critical legal history.  

What was law in colonial India? In this brilliant work of historical ontology, Faisal Chaudhry retells the history of Britain’s India as a revealing case study of the global expansion of law’s empire. Bringing together an extraordinary array of sources, from socio-legal theory and the philosophy of jurisprudence to everyday case law, Chaudhry deftly connects the theory and practice of law in colonial South Asia to the globalization of classical legal thought. More than a legal history, this book offers a new history of modern legality. It will be essential reading for historians of South Asia, for historians of the British Empire, and for all readers interested in the history of law and jurisprudence in the modern world.