Risking a Colonial Anticolonialism: Chapter 10: Global Law: Ruling the British Empire

Martti Koskenniemi’s 10th chapter offers a grand history in miniature, a 100-page sweep of British colonialism from the 16th to early 19th centuries. Although it opens with the trial of the governor-general of India Warren Hastings, an event that exercises a talisman-like hold on the imagination of historians of British liberal empire, the chapter is primarily devoted to legal justifications around colonialism in the Americas. More than fulfilling the book’s objective of showing the force of legal vocabularies in global events, it illuminates the importance of vocabularies prior to the legal one – those of race and history. In the end, the legal imagination seems to have possessed more ex post than ex ante discursive power, its development a consequence of rather than a force in driving these events. In the disentanglement of notions of property and sovereignty, too, force seems at times to have mattered more than legal wranglings. The difficulty in adjudicating causality is rooted partly in the chapter’s avoidance of chronological exposition, making it difficult to trace how and why ideas developed. Though Koskenniemi approaches the study of international law with a profound awareness of its rootedness in colonialism, his method and exposition leave us somewhat confused about how law mattered in colonialism and elide the extent to which it was contested and changed in colonial settings.