UMass Law UMass Law: Professor Chaudhry Publishes New Book, South Asia, the British Empire, and the Rise of Classical Legal Thought: Towards a Historical Ontology of Law

UMass Law Professor Faisal Chaudhry investigates the legal history of colonial rule in South Asia from 1757 to the early twentieth century in his newly published book.

In his newly published book, South Asia, the British Empire, and the Rise of Classical Legal Thought: Towards a Historical Ontology of Law, Professor Faisal Chaudhry provides a re-reading of the history of legal change under colonial rule in South Asia from 1757 to the early twentieth century. Broaching major questions in the history of political and economic modernity, the study of law and empire, and legal theory, the book tells a story of the emergence of a new ideal of private law—organized around the categories of property, contract, and status—in the South Asian subcontinent in the period after the great anti-colonial rebellion of 1857 and amidst the rise and globalization of what historians of the Anglo-common law mainstream have called classical legal thought. Prefacing its narrative of events after 1857 and the formal assumption of sovereignty over the subcontinent by the Crown-in-Parliament is the book’s preceding discussion of the historical realignment of notions and practices of sovereignty, land control, and adjudicatory rectification under the East India Company’s so-called rule of property during the first century of British colonialism. These two halves of the book’s treatment of the legal history of British imperial rule, themselves, are prefaced by an opening several chapters that set out the book’s entirely novel ‘historical ontological’ approach to the great question of jurisprudence: namely, that which has so long stoked inquiry into law’s nature and left thinkers asking what is the law? In so doing the book presents a deliberate challenge to conventional philosophical jurisprudence, given the way it near invariably commences its theorizing against the empirical backdrop of the history of the ‘western’ world alone.