Victorian MPs debated whether or not the Inns of Court adequately governed the bar and effectively trained their members. The societies defended themselves from parliamentary assaults by insisting that legal etiquette ensured the gentlemanly character of the bar. This chapter examines disciplinary hearings for violations of etiquette at the Inns to consider the societies’ direct assertions of their authority over the operations of the legal profession. In the nineteenth century, breaches of legal etiquette largely pertained to ungentlemanly behavior, such as engaging in trade. In the geopolitical context of the early twentieth century, however, faced with members holding new radical political commitments, the societies overlaid concerns about gentlemanliness with worries over personal political expression and national loyalty. The societies manipulated legal etiquette to deliberately excuse or disbar members for similar offenses along lines that accorded more with members’ seeming Britishness or foreignness than with the legality or illegality of their actions.

This chapter examines the Inns’ largest and most on-going source of concern regarding radical politics, Indian nationalists, whom the Inns sometimes conflated with Indian students more generally. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, men from throughout the empire, but in greatest number from India, came to London to study law. By the early twentieth century, burgeoning colonial nationalist movements gained visibility for their causes, sometimes through violent actions in the colonies or in London. Members of the Inns came to distrust the potentially radical politics of their overseas members, equating all imperial subjects with anti-British actions. The societies collaborated with the British government to consider quotas limiting the number of Indian students in London. They debated whether or not colonial students were capable of being trained to be self-regulating subjects who would willingly submit to and replicate existing structures of power.

This chapter explores some of the particular dynamics of differentiated colonial governance at the apex of colonial rule, and how governance changed in response to political and economic shocks of the twentieth century. It begins with the establishment of the Government of India following the rebellion of 1857, and the general characteristics of colonial rule in the Victorian and Edwardian eras. It then provides snapshots of aspects of governance, based on a variety of data from the 1910s, differentiated by governance category. It provides data on land revenue and total revenue, judicial and nonjudicial stamp tax, income taxes and the number of government servants, police deployment and army recruitment and deployment. The chapter then surveys some of the key changes in politics and government of the last decades of the colonial era, including economic dislocations and the rise of the nationalist government. I use data from the 1940s, including revenue and policing, to demonstrate that these governance distinctions remain relevant despite significant pressures toward greater institutionalization, and that the influence of the Indian National Congress itself varied by territory.

Chapter one analyses the geneses of ethno-nationalism in postcolonial states by highlighting the three key elements of ethno-nationalist politics: the modernist response to primordial attachments in the process of nation-building, the active role and passive consequences of colonialism, and the influence of bourgeois and petty bourgeois classes under capitalism. Critically engaging with seminal scholarship in relevant fields by Clifford Geertz, Donald Horowitz, Antonio Gramsci, and Partha Chatterjee, my analysis in this chapter underscores that ethno-nationalism in postcolonial states is, to a great extent, the outcome of a combined force of all three elements. While the three elements highlighted in my analysis of ethno-nationalism are not exclusive aspects, ethno-nationalism in postcolonial states primarily draws on the elements of nation-building, colonialism, and capitalism. I substantiate this claim with the case of anticolonial nationalist movements in India. I demonstrate how conditions created by colonialism, capitalism, and the modernist vision of the nascent Indian state gave the nationalist movement an ethno-nationalist character that ultimately led to the partition of the country along religious lines.