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SUMMARY:'Banditry and the Law: The problems of Toryism and thuggee in earl
 y modern Ireland and eighteenth century India.' - Alix Chartrand\, Faculty
  of History 
DTSTART:20151118T170000Z
DTEND:20151118T190000Z
UID:TALK62597@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Kate Bruce-Lockhart
DESCRIPTION:Throughout the early modern period and the eighteenth century\
 , one of the primary ways in which the British attempted to legitimate the
 ir claims to sovereignty in Ireland and India was through the law\, which 
 was widely considered to be one of the essential components of any civilis
 ed society.  However\, while the law was used as a tool of education withi
 n colonial settings\, the repeated manipulation of this law by the British
  when challenged by members of the Irish or Indian population also indicat
 es that this had specific limitations.  This paper considers the ways in w
 hich the British attempted to control the behaviour of the colonised throu
 gh the law\, and analyses the ways in which subversive behaviours challeng
 ed larger British claims to sovereignty.\nThe paper will focus on two spec
 ific forms of subversive behaviour\, the highway bandits known in Ireland 
 as tories and in India as dacoits or thugs.  Both of these cases serve to 
 illustrate the extent to which banditry was perceived as a threat to the u
 nity of the state.  Furthermore\, they also represent clear examples of ca
 ses in which the British ignored\, bypassed or disregarded the legal syste
 ms they had previously upheld in order to deal with behaviours that they b
 elieved to have serious social and political implications.
LOCATION:Wolfson Seminar Room South\, Trinity College 
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