A Despotism of Law: Crime and Justice in Early Colonial India

This book explores the emergence of colonial criminal law against the backdrop of the British conquest and pacification of north India. Criminal justice is examined as an ideological and cultural enterprise in which the East India Company sought to communicate new notions of sovereign right. Central to this enterprise was the claim that legitimate violence was the sole prerogative of the state, an assertion which brought colonial law into conflict with the competing claims of religious, patriarchal and patronal authority. Though the Company's judicial institutions manoeuvred around caste, rank and patriarchy, they also engaged with various projects of modernity to assert a more transcendent and undivided notion of sovereignty. Dr. Singha's book also investigates the shift in some of the presumptions underlying criminal trial, and various experiments in penal techniques.