Course overview
The course critically examines the relationships between law and colonialism. Topics include: how law has been used as an instrument of colonial and anti-colonial processes; how law has been the product of colonisation, as well as productive of colonial forms of authority and subjectivity; how law has been a site of colonial struggles, transformations and movements; how law has been part of a cultural imaginary implicated in Orientalisms old and new; and how law has been treated as a gift of colonisation as well as a measure of its achievements. The focus is on modern European colonisation, particularly that of the British Empire in the nineteenth century and its continuations into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The course is strongly interdisciplinary, crossing law, anthropology, history, international studies, cultural studies, and social and political theory.