Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: New Books in Law
Episode: Alastair McClure, "Trials of Sovereignty: Mercy, Violence, and the Making of Criminal Law in British India, 1857-1922" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
Description: Trials of Sovereignty: Mercy, Violence, and the Making of Criminal Law in British India, 1857-1922 (Cambridge UP, 2024) offers the first legal history of mercy and discretion in nineteenth and twentieth-century India. Through a study of large-scale amnesties, the prerogative powers of pardon, executive commutation, and judicial sentencing practices, Alastair McClure argues that discretion represented a vital facet of colonial rule. In a bloody penal order, officials and judges consistently offered reduced sentences and pardons for select subjects, encouraging others to approach state institutions and confer the colonial state with greater legitimacy. Mercy was always a contested expression of sovereign pow...