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This course will introduce students to some of the historiographical debates on law and economic life in the Indian Ocean. The time period for the course will roughly coincide with the emergence of various European trading companies in India till the consolidation of a global interconnected economy and colonialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The Indian Ocean has emerged as a burgeoning field for scholars writing histories of the empire, trade and production, commodity flows, circuits of labor migration, familial networks of trade and credit arrangements, diaspora and religious networks spanning across different time and scales. Many of these histories have unearthed a range of alternative sources such as diaries, commercial and legal documents, contracts, photographs, family/community histories. They have helped complicate some of the existing narratives on colonial encounters, public sphere, migration and diaspora culture and slavery and other forms of unfree labor. Recent interventions have also looked to the Indian Ocean to understand the formation of law across different sites such as ports, courts, its circulation through people, ideas, texts, ships and goods and its important role in the politico-economic constitution of empires in the Indian Ocean.
In the background of this existing historiography on trade and empire, networks and cultural exchange in the Indian ocean, this course will look at some of the debates on sovereignty, legal pluralism, the circulation of Islamic and English legal culture, colonial construction of stable mercantile, commercial and laboring relationships through different instruments such as contracts and lastly the ordinary litigants’ imagination of law as they navigated multiple legalities in the Indian Ocean. Specifically, the course will look at the experiences of merchants, slaves, domestic servants, soldiers, and sailors and their intersections with different expressions of colonial law in the port cities of colonial India. The course will ask the following questions:
- How did the movement of the law constitute the Indian Ocean and its economic life?
- How did the British common law interact with local and regional systems of justice and authority and vernacular understandings of law?
- What were the consequences of these interactions on sovereignty, property rights, trade and labor relationships in the Indian Ocean?
- In what ways did the mobility, circulation and exchange of goods and people further the dominance of law as well as its appropriation by ordinary litigants in the courtrooms of law?
In order to understand some of these recent historiographical trends the course will combine a study of some of the foundational texts on Indian ocean histories with seminal works that have unearthed the mobile lives of law in the Indian Ocean. We will also look at a range of primary sources such as travel writing, diaries, legal texts, contracts, autobiographies and court testimonies.
Deutsch:
Dieser Kurs führt die Studierenden in einige der historiographischen Debatten über Recht und Wirtschaftsleben im Indischen Ozean ein. Der Zeitraum, in dem der Kurs stattfindet, deckt sich in etwa mit der Entstehung verschiedener europäischer Handelsgesellschaften in Indien bis zur Konsolidierung einer global vernetzten Wirtschaft und des Kolonialismus im 19. und 20.Jahrhundert. |
