Imperial incarceration: detention without trial in the making of British Colonial Africa

Abstract

deeds and so on), it is only through comparison – with other documents, with other collections, with other dates – that analytical observations about structure and process become possible. To compare exemplars from manuals to examples from the archive is one thing; to engage in large-scale comparison across time and space is another. Yet such comparisons require archival access, linguistic adroitness and analytical acumen. For an individual scholar, these demands are limiting. When presented as a call for collaboration, they become liberating. Negotiating Mughal Law makes the case for expanding collaborative efforts by illustrating the depth, detail and complexity that working with a single family’s collection can add to collective understandings of law’s operations under varied imperial formations. For example, it is only by providing opportunities to see the full picture across regions and contexts that scholars will be able to communicate the multiple meanings of zamīndār to students of South Asian history. Imagine if scholars had access not just to a single family’s collection but to several families’ collections located not just in Mughal India but throughout Persianate Eurasia and the Islamicate Indian Ocean world. How might understandings of preand early modern law change as a result of having access to expanded data sets? How might these document collections change the way we talk about the history of European imperial expansion and its attendant cultural encounters? And how might we challenge the importance and centrality of the colonial archive that dominates these histories by making collections that have been transported, transplanted, uprooted and unmoored available to anyone with an internet connection, rather than relying on the scholarly mobility of a few privileged passport holders who can piece the collections together? These are the questions that Negotiating Mughal Law implores us to ask and invites us to consider as we think about the operation of law not only in terms of nations and empires but globally and comparatively as well.