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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 December 2018

Leonard Hodges
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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 

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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.

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