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Podcast: New Books in Law
Episode: Faisal Chaudhry, "South Asia, the British Empire, and the Rise of Classical Legal Thought: Toward a Historical Ontology of the Law" (Oxford UP, 2024)
Description: South Asia, the British Empire, and the Rise of Classical Legal Thought: Toward a Historical Ontology of the Law (Oxford UP, 2024) considers the legal history of colonial rule in South Asia from 1757 to the early 20th century. It traces a shift in the conceptualization of sovereignty, land control, and adjudicatory rectification, arguing that under the East India Company the focus was on 'the laws' factoring into the administration of justice more than 'the law' as an infinitely generative norm system. This accompanied a discourse about rendering property 'absolute' defined in terms of a certainty of controlling land's rent-and made ad...