Trials of Sovereignty
Mercy, Violence, and the Making of Criminal Law in British India, 1857–1922

Offers the first legal history of mercy and discretion in nineteenth and twentieth-century India.

Alastair McClure (Author)

9781009553544, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 28 November 2024

386 pages
23.5 x 15.9 x 2.9 cm, 0.73 kg

'McClure's argument resides in his sharp analysis of the counter-current or underside of the terroristic and violent attributes of the colonial state - it is his focus on the uneven, conditional and 'double-edged' acts of the sovereign's mercy that permeate colonial judgements, courts and disciplinary institutions. By reflecting on the co-constitutive relationship of colonial violence and colonial mercy, McClure provides a conceptual category that refines our understanding of colonial sovereignty, popular consent and imperial subjecthood.' Kamalpreet Kaur, Social History

Trials of Sovereignty offers the first legal history of mercy and discretion in nineteenth and twentieth-century India. Through a study of large-scale amnesties, the prerogative powers of pardon, executive commutation, and judicial sentencing practices, Alastair McClure argues that discretion represented a vital facet of colonial rule. In a bloody penal order, officials and judges consistently offered reduced sentences and pardons for select subjects, encouraging others to approach state institutions and confer the colonial state with greater legitimacy. Mercy was always a contested expression of sovereign power that risked exposing colonial weakness. This vulnerability was gradually recognized by colonial subjects who deployed a range of legal and political strategies to interrogate state power and question the lofty promises of British colonial justice. By the early twentieth century, the decision to break the law and reject imperial overtures of mercy had developed into a crucial expression of anticolonial politics.

List of Figures and Tables
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
1. Forgetting War and Punishing Crime
2. The Peace: The Queen's Proclamation and the Politics of Forgiveness
3. The Code: Judges, Juries and Punishing Difference
4. Discretion, the Death Penalty, and the Criminal Trial
5. Pardons and Scaffolds
6. Tilak's Radical Innocence: Mercy, Sedition, and the State Trial
7. Gandhi's Guilt and the Return of War
Conclusion
Epilogue
Select Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Asian history [HBJF]