Power and Property under Empire

• In Event: Law and Political Development: Learning about Politics from the Court Records

Abstract

How did empires use courts to administer and control their colonies? To date, work on colonial jurisprudence has largely focused on local disputes in local courts. Far less attention has been paid to colonial appellate bodies despite their major role in regulating and streamlining the implementation of law across empire. This paper turns attention to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council (JCPC), the court of final appeal for British Overseas Territories beginning in the mid-19th century. We specifically examine how the JCPC interpreted and resolved conflicts from African appellants, as well as the implications of these cases on governance in African territories. Using text-as-data methods on a novel corpus of legal decisions dating back to the 19th and early 20th centuries, we extract and analyze patterns of litigation across the British African empire, including information on the types of cases heard, the types of plaintiffs who were able to appeal to higher courts, the determinants of the outcome of the case, and the types of justices who were empowered to adjudicate these disputes. This analysis has implications for our understanding of how power and property were constituted in legal decision-making during the age of empire.

Authors

• Edgar Franco Vivanco, University of Michigan

• Fiona Shen-Bayh, William & Mary