Law and Violence
The colonial state, with its claims to introduce peace, reform, good governance and rule of law to the subcontinent, could not plausibly justify driving such a project at the barrel of a gun.
The rule of law provided an ostensibly colour-blind framework that served to justify and elide the ‘white violence' that pervaded social and labour relations between Indians and Britons. Up until the early 1900s, errant servants might be thrashed, and in the event of the servant's death judicial findings would routinely blame the fatality on the weakness of the Indian body, and the tendency of the native spleen to rupture at the slightest provocation.[102] The prevalence of interpersonal and interracial violence in British India provides an important subtext to the controversy sparked by the Ilbert Bill, a proposed amendment to the Criminal Procedure Code allowing Indian judges and juries to trial European criminals in 1883. Mass protests by the British expatriate community in India, accustomed to the liberal use of interpersonal violence in the name of protecting British women, led to its withdrawal.[103] The episode has long been held to be a defining moment in Indian nationalism, leading to the formation of the Indian National Congress in 1885, the organisation that by the early twentieth century would form the backbone of the independence movement.The tendency in contemporary Britain to view the empire with nostalgia has meant that attempts to highlight the everyday violence of the Raj have been resisted vehemently by both conservative academics and members of the public, many of them descendants of families who were invested in the Raj and who remain alert to the deconstruction of colonial mythologies. Bart Moore-Gilbert's candid family memoir, dealing with shocking revelations of the culture of police violence perpetuated by his father as an officer in India, is a useful corrective.[104]
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- Violence, Law and Community in Classical Athens
- This chapter deals with the place of Roman law in the creation and evolution of canon law, the law of the medieval church.1
- A century ago the legal realists declared that the real law is the law in action, not just the law in books.
- In Part One of this book, we considered the wider context in which the study of Roman law is set. This included, in Chapter 4, the influence of Roman law on later law, up to the present day.
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- Law of Commerce, Commercial Law, Business Law
- Violence against the Self, State Violence and Interpersonal Violence
- Within the world history of violence the Bible is relevant for our reconstructions of the lived experience of violence among ancient Israelites and Judeans;
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