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SUMMARY:A ‘military’ rule of law and the politics of the exception in 
 colonial Punjab\, 1849-1870 - Mark Condos (Wolfson College)
DTSTART:20121030T173000Z
DTEND:20121030T190000Z
UID:TALK40861@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Gui Xi Young
DESCRIPTION:"From the 1780s onwards\, the idea of a government which was s
 ubject to the rule of law provided one of the strongest moral endorsements
  for British colonial rule in India. According to this understanding\, the
  law was supposed to be something universal which applied equally to every
 one. In this way\, the moral legitimacy of British colonial legality was e
 stablished in contradistinction to the arbitrary sovereignty and personal 
 discretion of the regime of oriental despotism which it had replaced. At t
 he same time\, however\, this notion of a universal law also existed in a 
 perpetual tension with a discourse of emergency and exceptionalism which a
 rgued that\, as a ‘regime of conquest\,’ the British government in Ind
 ia also needed to preserve an ‘illimitable’ sovereignty of discretiona
 ry authority and powers. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the coloni
 al administration of Punjab\, where British officials insisted that the pr
 ovince was uniquely well–suited to a highly authoritarian form of rule d
 ue to the supposedly warlike and backward nature of its inhabitants. This 
 paper examines how the tensions between the rule of law and discourses of 
 exceptionalism were elaborated in Punjab. It argues that the Punjab system
  of governance represented a fundamentally ‘military’ form of governme
 nt\, underpinned by the priorities and politics of pacification\, and the 
 need to preserve British prestige as India’s ‘conquering race.’"
LOCATION:Seminar Room S2 Alison Richard Building
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