Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-g8jcs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-23T23:48:32.707Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Between Litigation and Arbitration: Administering Legal Pluralism in Eighteenth-Century Bombay

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 December 2018

Leonard Hodges
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article uses the records of the Bombay Mayor’s Court (1728–1798) to explore the ways in which an ostensibly English court of law attempted to administer law in a way that was acceptable to a cosmopolitan cast of litigants. I show how, due to the Court’s popularity with Indian litigants, and the difficulties of its hybrid jurisprudence, the Court eventually moved to a model of formalised arbitration. In this arrangement, local Indian elites exercised considerable autonomy, while British judges gained an illicit commission. As such, the evidence from the Mayor’s Court points to a novel iteration of legal pluralism in which ill-defined legal regimes came to blur and blend with each other in a single forum. I argue that this forces us to reconceptualise solely jurisdictional definitions of legal pluralism, which must be complimented with the study of a court’s ‘jurispractice’.

Keywords

BombayLegal PluralismEmpireLawMayor’s Court
Type
Articles
Information
Itinerario , Volume 42 , Issue 3 , December 2018 , pp. 490 - 515
Copyright
© 2018 Research Institute for History, Leiden University 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

Leonard Hodges is a PhD student at King’s College London working on the French Compagnie des Indes in eighteenth-century India under the supervision of Professor Richard Drayton and Dr David Todd. This article has benefited greatly from their guidance and advice, as well as those of Professor Margot Finn, Dr Arthur Fraas, the journal’s editor, and the two anonymous reviewers. I thank them all for their instructive feedback and comments.

References

Bibliography

Unpublished Primary Sources Google Scholar
British Library (BL), India Office Records (IOR), London:Google Scholar
Bombay Public Consultations (BCP):Google Scholar
BL IOR P/341/7.Google Scholar
BL IOR/P/341/15.Google Scholar
BL IOR/P/341/18.Google Scholar
Bombay Court of Judicature Proceedings:Google Scholar
BL IOR/P/416/99.Google Scholar
Bombay Mayor’s Court Proceedings (MCP):Google Scholar
BL IOR/P/416/101.Google Scholar
BL IOR/P/416/103.Google Scholar
BL IOR/P/416/104.Google Scholar
BL IOR/P/416/105.Google Scholar
BL IOR/P/416/107.Google Scholar
BL IOR/P/416/108.Google Scholar
BL IOR/P/416/114.Google Scholar
BL IOR/P/416/116.Google Scholar
BL IOR P/416/118.Google Scholar
BL IOR/P/417/1.Google Scholar
BL IOR/P/417/2.Google Scholar
BL IOR/P/417/3Google Scholar
BL IOR/P/417/4.Google Scholar
BL IOR/P/417/5.Google Scholar
BL IOR/P/417/6.Google Scholar
BL IOR/P/417/7.Google Scholar
BL IOR/P/417/17.Google Scholar
BL IOR/P/417/19.Google Scholar
Bombay Miscellaneous Judicial Papers:Google Scholar
BL IOR/H/432.Google Scholar
Correspondence Reports:Google Scholar
BL IOR D/19.Google Scholar
Letter Books of the Court of Directors:Google Scholar
BL IOR E/3/103.Google Scholar
BL IOR/E/3/105.Google Scholar
BL IOR/E/3/111.Google Scholar
Collections of the Board of Control:Google Scholar
BL IOR/F/4/21.Google Scholar
BL IOR F/4/60.Google Scholar
Published Primary Sources Google Scholar
Charters Relating to the East India Company from 1600 to 1761. Madras: Government Press, 1887.Google Scholar
Francis, Richard. Maxims of Equity etc. London, 1727.Google Scholar
Gazetteer of Bombay City and Island. 3 vols. Mumbai: Time Press, 1909–1910.Google Scholar
Grose, John Henry. A Voyage to the East Indies: Containing Authentic Accounts of the Mogul Government in General, the Viceroyalties of the Decan and Bengal, with Their Several Subordinate Dependencies. 2 vols. London, 1772.Google Scholar
Materials Towards a Statistical Account of the Town and Island of Bombay. 3 vols. Mumbai: Government Central Press, 1893–94.Google Scholar
von Pufendorf, Samuel. Of the Law of Nature and Nations, 3rd ed. Translated by Basil Kennett. London, 1717.Google Scholar
Selections from the Letters, Despatches, and Other State Papers Preserved in Bombay Secretariat: Home Series. 2 vols. Mumbai: Government Central Press, 1887.Google Scholar

Secondary Sources

Ames, Glenn J. “The Role of Religion in the Transfer and Rise of Bombay, c. 1661–1687.” Historical Journal 46:2 (2003): 317–340.Google Scholar
Anonymous. “An Age of Progress in Bombay.” Bombay Quarterly Review 5:1 (1857): 158–196.Google Scholar
Bailey, Joanne. “Voices in Court: Lawyers’ or Litigants’?” Historical Research 74:186 (2001): 392–407 Google Scholar
Baker, J. H. Introduction to English Legal History, 4th ed. London: Butterworths, 2002.Google Scholar
Balachandran, Aparna. “Of Corporations and Caste Heads: Urban Rule in Company Madras, 1640–1720.” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 9:2 (2008).Google Scholar
Barendse, Rene J. Arabian Seas 1700–1763. 4 vols. Leiden: Brill, 2009.Google Scholar
Bayly, C. A. Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.Google Scholar
Bayly, Susan. Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.Google Scholar
Benton, Lauren. Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regiments in World History, 1400–1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.Google Scholar
Benton, Lauren, and Ford, Lisa. Rage for Order: The British Empire and the Origins of International Law, 1800–1850. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2016.Google Scholar
Benton, Lauren, and Ross, Richard. “Empires and Legal Pluralism: Jurisdiction, Sovereignty, and Political Imagination in the Early Modern World.” In Legal Pluralism and Empires, 1500–1800, edited by Lauren Benton and Richard Ross, 1–17.New York: NYU Press, 2013.Google Scholar
Bhattacharya-Panda, Nandini. Appropriation and Invention of Tradition: The East India Company and Hindu Law in Early Colonial Bengal. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.Google Scholar
Boxer, Charles. Portuguese Society in the Tropics: The Municipal Councils of Goa, Macao, and Luanda. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1965.Google Scholar
Brimnes, Niels. “Beyond Colonial Law: Indigenous Litigation and the Contestation of Property in the Mayor’s Court in Late Eighteenth-Century Madras.” Modern Asian Studies 37:3 (2003): 513–550.Google Scholar
Brimnes, Niels. Constructing the Colonial Encounter: Right and Left Hand Castes in Early Colonial South India. Richmond, U.K.: Curzon Press, 1999.Google Scholar
Bulley, Anne. The Bombay Country Ships: 1790–1833. Richmond: Curzon, 2000.Google Scholar
Burbank, Jane, and Cooper, Frederick. “Rules of Law, Politics of Empire.” In Legal Pluralism and Empires, 1500–1800, edited by Lauren Benton and Richard Ross, 279–293. New York: NYU Press, 2013.Google Scholar
Chatterjee, Nandini. “Religious Change, Social Conflict and Legal Competition: The Emergence of Christian Personal Law in Colonial India.” Modern Asian Studies 44:6 (2010): 1147–1195.Google Scholar
Da Cunha, Joseph. The Origin of Bombay. Bombay: The Education Press, 1900.Google Scholar
Das Gupta, Ashin. Indian Merchants and the Decline of Surat, c. 1700–1750. Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1979.Google Scholar
Davies, Timothy. “British Private Trade Networks in the Arabian Seas, c. 1680–c. 1760.” PhD diss., University of Warwick, 2012.Google Scholar
Davies, Timothy. “English Private Trade on the West Coast of India, c. 1680–c. 1740.” Itinerario 38:2 (2014): 51–73.Google Scholar
Derrett J., Duncan M. “Justice, Equity and Good Conscience.” In Changing Law in Developing Countries, edited by J. N. D. Anderson, 114–153. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1963.Google Scholar
Derrett J., Duncan M.. “Justice, Equity and Good Conscience in India.” In Essays in Classical and Modern Hindu Law: Current Problems and the Legacy of the Past, vol. 4, 8–27. Brill: Leiden, 1978.Google Scholar
Elliott, J. H. “A Europe of Composite Monarchies.” Past & Present 137 (1992): 48–71.Google Scholar
Erickson, Amy. Women and Property in Early Modern England. London: Routledge, 1995.Google Scholar
Ertl, Thomas, and Kruijtzer, Gijs. “Introduction.” In Law Addressing Diversity: Pre-Modern Europe and India in Comparison (13th to 18th Centuries), edited by Thomas Ertl and Gijs Kruijtzer. Munich: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2017.Google Scholar
Fawcett, Charles. The First Century of British Justice in India: An Account of the Court of Judicature at Bombay, Established in 1672, and of Other Courts of Justice in Madras, Calcutta, and Bombay, from 1661 to the Later Part of the Eighteenth Century. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934.Google Scholar
Finn, Margot C. The Character of Credit: Personal Debt in English Culture, 1740–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.Google Scholar
Finn, Margot C. “«Frictions» d’empire: Les réseaux de circulation des successions et des patrimoines dans la Bombay coloniale des années 1780.” Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 65:5 (2010): 1175–1204.Google Scholar
Fortier, Mark. The Culture of Equity in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Britain and America. Farnham: Ashgate, 2015.Google Scholar
Fraas, Arthur. “Making Claims: Indian Litigants and the Expansion of the English Legal World in the Eighteenth Century.” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 15:1 (2014).Google Scholar
Fraas, Arthur. “‘They Have Travelled into a Wrong Latitude’: The Laws of England, Indian Settlements, and the British Imperial Constitution 1726–1773.” PhD diss., Duke University, 2011.Google Scholar
French, H. R. “The Search for the Middle Sort of People in England.” Historical Journal 43:1 (2000): 277–293.Google Scholar
Ganguly, Charu Chandra. “Evolution of the Small Cause Courts in India, 1753–1887, with special reference to the Presidency Court at Calcutta.” Journal of the Indian Law Institute 16:1 (1974): 98–108.Google Scholar
Gladfelder, Hal. Fanny Hill in Bombay: The Making & Unmaking of John Cleland. Baltimore, M.D.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012.Google Scholar
Gommans, Jos, and Kuiper, Jitske. “The Surat Castle Revolutions: Myths of an Anglo-Bania Order and Dutch Neutrality, c. 1740–1760.” Journal of Early Modern History 10:4 (2006): 361–389.Google Scholar
Guha, Sumit. Beyond Caste: Identity and Power in South Asia, Past and Present. Leiden: Brill, 2013.Google Scholar
Guha, Sumit. “Wrongs and Rights in the Maratha Country: Antiquity, Custom and Power.” In Changing Concepts of Rights and Justice in South Asia, edited by M. R. Anderson and Sumit Guha, 14–29. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004.Google Scholar
Haruki, Inagaki. “The Rule of Law and Emergency in Colonial India: The Conflict between the King’s Court and the Government in Bombay in the 1820s.” PhD diss., King’s College London, 2016.Google Scholar
Hermes, Katherine A. “‘Justice Will Be Done Us’: Algonquian Demands for Reciprocity in the Courts of European Settlers.” In The Many Legalities of Early America, edited by Christopher L. Thomlins and Bruce H. Mann, 123–149. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.Google Scholar
Hermes, Katherine A. “The Law of Native Americans.” In The Cambridge History of Law in America, vol. 1, Early America (1580–1815), edited by Michael Grossberg and Christopher L. Tomlins, 32–62. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.Google Scholar
Horwitz, Henry, and Oldham, James. “John Locke, Lord Mansfield, and Arbitration during the Eighteenth Century.” Historical Journal 36:1 (1993): 137–159.Google Scholar
Jain, Mahabir Prashad. Outlines of Indian Legal History, 6th ed. Mumbai: N. M. Tripathi, 2005.Google Scholar
Landau, Norma. The Justices of the Peace, 1679–1760. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.Google Scholar
Lieberman, David. The Province of Legislation Determined: Legal Theory in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.Google Scholar
Lobban, Michael. The Common Law and English Jurisprudence, 1760–1850. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991.Google Scholar
Love, Henry Davison. Vestiges of Old Madras, 1640–1800: Traced from the East India Company’s Records Preserved at Fort St. George and the India Office and from Other Sources. 4 vols. London: Murray, 1913.Google Scholar
Malabari, Phiroze. Bombay in the Making: Being Mainly a History of the Origin and Growth of Judicial Institutions in the Western Presidency 1661–1726. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1910.Google Scholar
Marglin, Jessica M. Across Legal Lines: Jews and Muslims in Modern Morocco. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2016.Google Scholar
McGilvary, George. East India Patronage and the British State: The Scottish Elite and Politics in the Eighteenth Century. London: I. B. Tauris, 2008.Google Scholar
Merry, Sally Engle. “Legal Pluralism.” Law & Society Review 22:5 (1988): 869–896.Google Scholar
Mines, Mattison. “Courts of Law and Styles of Self in Eighteenth-Century Madras: From Hybrid to Colonial Self.” Modern Asian Studies 35:1 (2001): 33–7 4.Google Scholar
Mukherji, T. K. “Aldermen and Attorneys: ̶ Mayor’s Court, Calcutta.” Indian Historical Quarterl 26:1 (1950): 51–66.Google Scholar
Nightingale, Pamela. Trade and Empire in Western India, 1784–1806. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970.Google Scholar
Oidtmann, Max. “A ‘Dog-Eat-Dog’ World: Qing Jurispractices and the Legal Inscription of Piety in Amdo.” Extrême-Orient Extrême-Occident 40 (2016): 151–182.Google Scholar
Parasher, Gauri. “Observations on the Role of the Chambre de Consultation in the Administration of Justice in Pondicherry (1778–1827).” Outre-mers 103:338–89 (2015): 43–64.Google Scholar
Prasad, Rajendra, ed. A Historical-Developmental Study of Classical Indian Philosophy of Morals, vol. 12, part ii. Delhi: Concept, 2009.Google Scholar
Price, Pamela. “The ‘Popularity’ of the Imperial Courts of Law: Three Views of the Anglo-Indian Legal Encounter.” In European Expansion and Law in 19th- and 20th-Century Africa and Asia, edited by W. J. Mommsen and J. A. De Moor, 179–200. Oxford: Berg, 1992.Google Scholar
Raman, Bhavani. Document Raj: Writing and Scribes in Early Colonial South India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012.Google Scholar
Rankin, George Claus. Background to Indian Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1946.Google Scholar
Reyes, A. F. T. “English and French Approaches to Personal Laws in South India: 1700–1850.” PhD diss., University of Cambridge, 1986.Google Scholar
Rocher, Rosane. “The Creation of Anglo-Hindu Law.” In Hinduism and Law, edited by Timothy Lubin, Donald R. Davis, Jr., and Jayanth K. Krishnan, 78–88. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.Google Scholar
Ross, Richard, and Stern, Philip. “Reconstructing Early Modern Notions of Legal Pluralism.” In Legal Pluralism and Empires, 1500–1850, edited by Lauren Benton and Richard Ross, 109–141. New York: NYU Press, 2013.Google Scholar
Seneviratne-Rupesinghe, Nadeera. “Negotiating Custom: Colonial Lawmaking in the Galle Landraad.” PhD diss., Leiden University, 2015.Google Scholar
Setalvad, Motilal Chimanlal. The Common Law in India. London: Stevens & Sons Ltd., 1960.Google Scholar
Smith, Sheila. “Fortune and Failure: The Survival of Family Firms in Eighteenth-Century Bombay.” Business History 35:4 (1993): 44–65.Google Scholar
Sood, Gagan D. S. India and the Islamic Heartlands: An Eighteenth-Century World of Circulation and Exchange. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016.Google Scholar
Sood, Gagan D. S. “Sovereign Justice in Precolonial Maritime Asia: The Case of the Mayor’s Court of Bombay, 1726–1798.” Itinerario 37:2 (2013): 46–72.Google Scholar
Spagnolo, John P. “Portents of Empire in Britain’s Ottoman Extraterritorial Jurisdiction.” Middle Eastern Studies 27:2 (1991): 256–282.Google Scholar
Stern, Philip. The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.Google Scholar
Subramanian, Lakshmi. “Capital and Crowd in a Declining Port City: The Anglo-Bania Order and the Surat Riots of 1795.” Modern Asian Studies 19:2 (1985): 205–237.Google Scholar
Subramanian, Lakshmi. Indigenous Capital and Imperial Expansion: Bombay, Surat, and the West Coast. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996.Google Scholar
Torri, Michelguglielmo. “Surat during the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century: What Kind of Social Order? A Rejoinder to Lakshmi Subramanian.” Modern Asian Studies 21:4 (1987): 679–710.Google Scholar
Travers, Robert. Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth-Century India: The British in Bengal. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.Google Scholar
Wilson, Jon E. “Early Colonial India Beyond Empire.” Historical Journal 50:4 (2007): 951–970.Google Scholar
Wilson, Jon E. Domination of Strangers: Modern Governance in Eastern India, 1780–1835. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.Google Scholar
Yannakakis, Yanna. “Beyond Jurisdictions: Native Agency in the Making of Colonial Legal Cultures. A Review Essay.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 57:4 (2015): 1070–1082.Google Scholar