Numerous studies have examined the roots of British colonial law-making, particularly in South and Southeast Asia, where legal pluralism emerged as a pervasive feature of colonial governance. But there remains a conspicuous paucity of scholarship examining the systems of justice and law under French rule in Southeast Asia. It is within this historiographical context that Sally Francis Low’s Colonial Law Making: Cambodia under the French emerges as a significant contribution to an area that has been largely overlooked. Based on meticulous archival research drawn from both French and Cambodian sources, the work reflects the author’s sustained scholarly commitment to a subject situated beyond her primary geographical and intellectual milieu.

The book contains eight chapters elaborating the complexities, dichotomies, and hybridity experienced by the French in their law-making process in the Indochinese protectorate of the Kingdom of Cambodia between 1863 and 1954. It may be reasonable to argue that the author’s first chapter covering the scope of colonial narratives on colonialism and civilization is a stark reflection of the intellectual debt that she owes to scholars like Lauren Benton and Lisa Ford, as this chapter examines how the cleavage between state law and customs functioned hand in hand in the protectorate of Indochina.

One of the most significant contributions of her work is the comparative analysis of British colonial law-making in South Asia and the French approach in Indochina. In South Asia, English law penetrated the colonies largely through the expansion of British settlements, which gradually supplanted indigenous jurisdictions. By contrast, in her analysis of Cambodia, indigenous courts retained jurisdiction over civil and commercial matters, as well as many aspects of criminal law, at least at the first instance. The book offers a vivid account of the arcane practices that prevailed within the Cambodian monarchy and illustrates how the French maintained indigenous legal traditions without formally abolishing them, thereby creating a quintessential example of legal hybridity. In the introduction, she vividly depicts the opening of the new Palais de Justice in Phnom Penh in 1925, presenting it as a symbolic manifestation of French triumph in their Indochinese protectorate, where both Cambodian indigenous law and the Napoleonic Code were preserved to serve French geopolitical interests.

Although the French demonstrated tact in maintaining both legal systems to ensure continuity of their rule, their administration of the protectorate experienced significant internal turbulence and indigenous resistance. In the fifth chapter, the author identifies the 1916 disturbance within the protectorate as a pivotal event that enabled further reforms in Cambodian jurisdiction and led to the consolidation of provincial, administrator-run courts under French jurisdiction. Drawing on Upendra Baxi’s Postcolonial Legality, Low concludes by arguing that law-making under the French in the Indochina protectorate entrenched an ethos of authoritarianism and royal rule, thereby constraining any emancipatory potential that legal reform might have offered.

The primary limitation I observed in this work is the author’s omission of contemporary international legal scholarship, such as Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL), particularly regarding the concepts of civilization and protectorate, from the main narrative. Nevertheless, this book remains a valuable resource for readers interested in the history of colonial law-making.