Notice from Shaunnagh Dorsett (Shaunnagh.Dorsett@uts.edu.au):
Legal Histories of Empire: Second Symposium
Join us for the second
of several symposia planned for 2020 and 2021 for Legal Histories of Empire.
Our speakers:
Lisa Ford: 'The King's Colonial Peace: Variable subjecthood and
the transformation of empire'
This paper is drawn from my forthcoming
book, The King's Peace: Empire and Order in the British Empire. The book uses
colonial peacekeeping as a lens through which to examine the shifting parameters
of crown prerogative in Empire in the Age of Revolutions. This paper will argue
that the legal vulnerability of (and often threats to order posed by) a diverse
array of subjects - formerly French Catholics in Quebec, Caribbean slaves and
NSW convicts - both prompted and justified the unravelling of the very idea of
the freeborn Englishman that had been mobilised by protestant Britons in
pre-revolutionary America.
Lisa Ford is Professor of History at the
University of New South Wales, Australia. Her major publications include
Settler Sovereignty: Jurisdiction and Indigenous People in America and Australia,
1788-1836 (2010) which won the Littleton-Griswold Prize (American Historical
Association); the Thomas J. Wilson Prize (Harvard University Press); and the
Premiers History Award (NSW). She is also co-author of Rage for Order: The
British Empire and the Origins of International Law, 1800-1850 (co-authored
with Lauren Benton, 2016) and author of The King’s Peace, which will be
published by Harvard later this year. Ford is currently leading a collaborative
project funded by the Australian Research Council exploring the role of
commissions of inquiry sent throughout the British Empire in the 1820s on which
subject she hopes to lead author a book manuscript this year. She also holds a
four-year ARC Future Fellowship, during which she will explore the changing use
of martial law in the British Empire from the late eighteenth century until
1865.
Jessica
Hinchy: 'Child Removal and
the Colonial Governance of the Family: Hijra and "Criminal Tribe" Households
in North India, c. 1865-1900'
Historians have primarily examined
colonial child removal projects in settler colonial contexts. Yet from 1865,
the colonial government in north India forcibly removed children from
criminalised communities. Child separation began in the households of gender
non-conforming people labelled ‘eunuchs,’ particularly Hijras, and eventually
extended to socially marginalised people designated as ‘criminal tribes,’
especially Sansiyas. First, what does a comparison of these child removal
schemes tell us about the colonial governance of the family? Patrilineal,
conjugal and reproductive household models marginalised Hijras and Sansiyas in
differing ways, while the category of ‘child’ was contingently defined. Child
separation was attempted to varying ends, including both elimination and
assimilation. Yet often, the colonial state could not sustain such intensified
forms of intimate governance in the face of resistance from households. Nor
could officials simply determine removed children’s futures. Second, what does
child removal suggest about the making of colonial law? When children were
initially removed from Hijra and Sansiya households, officials admitted that
‘the law may have been somewhat strained,’ since existing laws did not provide
police or magistrates with legal powers to separate these children. The Sansiya
child removal project, for instance, prompted debates about colonial legal
exceptions and the ‘legality’ of the colonial state’s practices among colonial officials
and Indian and European non-officials.
Jessica Hinchy is an Assistant Professor
of History at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. She researches the
history of gender, sexuality, households and family in colonial north India. In
2019, Cambridge University Press published her first monograph, Governing
Gender and Sexuality in Colonial India: The Hijra, c. 1850-1900. Her research
has also appeared in Modern Asian Studies, Gender & History and Asian
Studies Review, among other journals.
The event will take place by zoom on Friday
5 March (or Thursday 4 March, depending on your timezone - see below). Please
register here (via
Eventbrite) to attend.
Timezones:
Sydney @ 12.30 pm on 5 March
Singapore @ 9.30 am on 5 March
Auckland @ 2.30 pm on 5 March
New Delhi @ 7.00 am on 5 March
London/Dublin @ 1.30 am on 5 March
Nairobi @ 4.30 am on 5 March
Vancouver @ 5.30 pm on 4 March
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