The task of the modern historian is not an easy one, and any attempt to trace the history of international law may need to consider the late jurist Christopher Weeramantry's words that “international law is a cloak of legality thrown over the subjugation of colonized people”.Footnote 1 It is in this context that we need to assess Priyasha Saksena's work as a novel contribution to the scholarship. In international law, “sovereignty” remains the cardinal point from which all related substantive or procedural debates have emerged. The notion of sovereignty that the author narrates in her compelling work differs from that of sixteenth-century Western thinkers such as Hobbes and Bodin. For those thinkers, if sovereignty was to be achieved, it was based on protecting the state against outsiders. But, Saksena takes a more nuanced approach by projecting sovereignty during the British Raj as a discourse for deciding the legal status of the princely states in India, and she further discusses how the question of sovereignty arose in the colonial period and contributed to the formation of the modern Indian state. With significant intellectual influence from the works of Lauren Benton and Rande Kostal, the author aptly unfolds the twisted identities of the princely states through the lens of sovereignty.
After briefly presenting an overview, Chapter 2 is an analysis that tries to locate the applicability of sovereignty as an ambivalent concept in the unequal relationship that existed between the British and the princely states. In this encounter, British paramountcy was upheld by using international law as an imperial tool favouring the interests of the British East India Company. The discussion from Chapter 3 highlights the structural changes made by the British after the 1857 Mutiny, which ended the rule of their East India Company by consolidating British central power over India as a direct subject of the Crown. Saksena gives an interesting account of the issues of sovereignty that pervaded the troubled relations between the British and princely states. The main one was Henry Maine's depiction of sovereignty as “a divisible” and as a question of fact, which attracted the British authorities in India to establish their rule by claiming that princely states were under the orbit of British rule in India. Chapters 4 and 5 deal with the usage of sovereignty as a double-edged sword in the interwar years, where the British used sovereignty as a legal basis to intervene in the internal affairs of the princely states. In return, the princely states also sought to redefine sovereignty as a divisible concept, which enabled them to acquire a quasi-international status.
The centralized notion of territorial sovereignty that emerged in the advent of decolonization in South Asia is well discussed by Saksena in Chapter 6. For instance, the author shows how the State of Hyderabad disappeared from the political landscape of South Asia with the articulation of territorial sovereignty as the paramount factor. The author should be complimented for undertaking a complex and challenging field of research. It is my sincere hope that this book will spur further debate in the scholarship.
Competing interests
The author declares none.
