Faisal Chaudhry’s South Asia, the British Empire, and the Rise of Classical Legal Thought is refreshingly original in both the conceptualisation of its object of inquiry and the method it adopts towards that task. It can be reasonably characterised as a genre-defying work, but given the exceptionally high standard of analytical rigour it sets for its field, it will not be easy for it to emerge as genre-defining scholarship. The book is long, ambitious, and a difficult read—its writing style demands a form of attention that is far removed from the kind habituated to consuming storied narratives in the social sciences, encouraged nowadays equally by disciplinary conventions and publishing strategies.

The book writes, following Ian Hacking’s reading of Michel Foucault, a ‘historical ontology’ of law in modernity, taking the relation between classical legal thought and colonial South Asian legality as a case in point where a distinct ontologisation of law took place during British rule in India. The book has three parts. The first part examines and critiques the multiple ways in which law has been naturalised as a self-contained system of normed propositions in different traditions of jurisprudential inquiry, socio-legal theory, systems analysis, and certain branches of Anglo-American analytic philosophy. The second and the third parts follow this critical trail, to understand the making of this unicity, of a self-contained naturalised object of referral, in British India, beginning from the Crown’s Raj in 1857, marked by the author as the moment of the globalisation of classical legal thought in South Asia.

The first part of the manuscript makes a number of interesting analytical moves. For brevity, I will mention only a few here. The author’s interrogation of a range of traditions in jurisprudential, socio-legal, and Anglo-American analytic philosophy is especially insightful, if one keeps in mind the rich historiography of colonialism, law, and modernity in South Asia that appeared in the context of a linguistic turn in the social sciences and was invested in laying bare the epistemological violence of colonialism. Unfortunately, these works rarely considered unpacking the making of ‘law’ in South Asia—as ‘colonial difference,’ or ‘invention of tradition’—in terms of the category’s objectification within its own field of formalism, that is, global jurisprudential thinking. At another theoretical front, Chaudhry makes an interesting intervention by reading Austin and Wittgenstein—I would say quite counter-intuitively, given the predominant directions of intellectual history today—by reading language-games not only as individual performance but at ‘an additional, distinct and broader social level as well—one where historic-cultural meaning is made, embedded, and remade’ (p. 128).

The second part of the book explores the process of the ontologisation of the legal in British India over the first half of the nineteenth century, when the East India Company’s (EIC) governmental framework was being established. Here, the author argues that the EIC’s governance was a rule of ‘laws’ and not a rule of the ‘law’. It was distinctly different from the naturalisation of the legal rationality that was in place in the Anglo-common law mainstream at that time. Such a rule of ‘laws’ meant that a doctrinal discourse of law was not in operation, as through ordinary-language discourse the notion of the legal produced by the EIC was aimed at conducting the practical business of sovereignty. The problem of understanding the ‘practical’ business of sovereignty is taken up by the author in this part through an extensive survey of the EIC’s engagement with land, property, and land revenue.

From this survey, the author persuasively argues that the EIC’s sovereignty and the rule of ‘laws’ aimed at defining ‘property’ as claims to a divisible–fungible monetisable value emerging from the land’s rent, which was a significantly different definition of ‘property’ in the contemporary Anglo-common law mainstream where the category was defined in terms of its physically indivisible objectivity, which enabled its subsequent positioning as a model for legal right in general. By this argument, the author also shows that in colonial-modern European texts despotism as a category was represented as productive of ‘laws,’ contrary to the more common understanding of it being devoid of any. Thus, standing on an early modern constitutionism, property in the land’s rent, and not in the land, became the basis of the company’s juridical aim of settling the country. From Zemindary to Raiyatwari, to Munro’s minute on Inaam lands, Chaudhry skilfully gathers diverse, and often seemingly divergent, fields of opinion to demonstrate how, despite their differences, they converged on the idea of property in the land’s rent being the defining marker of sovereignty and its legality. This is how, the author concludes, property-right remained extrinsic to the ontology of the legal in India during this period of EIC rule.

In the first chapter of part three, the book turns to a crucial moment in the long process of the ontologisation of the legal in British India. The author compellingly demonstrates how a new notion of property, as a form of right which is immaterial, relative, and disaggregable, pervaded ordinary language and doctrinal discourse on law in India in the second half of the nineteenth century. This notion, the author argues, emerged from the ‘classical legal thought’ of Anglo-common law and globalised itself, structuring the discourses of and about the ‘law’ in British India. Its globalising influence was concealed by colonial jurist-administrators, who presented this new view of property as an indigenous peculiarity—a feature of Indian ‘proprietary’ forms. Tracing the most sophisticated re-articulation of classical legal thought’s formulation of property as a ‘bundle of sticks’ in Baden-Powell’s works, in the debates around subordinate agrarian rights in the ‘pro-peasantry’ legislations of the 1880s in Bengal, in other protective agrarian legislations from other regions, as well as in a range of rarely discussed writings of lesser-known jurist-administrators, the author insightfully demonstrates how a discourse of ‘Indian exceptionalism’ in the nature of the ‘proprietary’ idiomised the globalisation of metropolitan juridical ideas of property, which would eventually serve to produce the idea of the legal right in general.

In the next chapter, the book turns to a close analysis of the law of contract and the idea of the ‘will’ shaping it. The author tracks the making of the contract law through its complex antecedents in the regulation of labour relations, as well as in the sphere of agrarian transactions. He argues that the idea of the ‘will’ in the contract act, despite its apparent associations with an ideology of laissez-faire, individualism, and self-determination, was constitutive of equivocal and often opposed ideas of the regulation, equity, and the public authority of the state. This work of the ‘will’ brought out ‘how inseparable the private and the public were in the law of contract’ (p. 345). Such an equivocation defined the late nineteenth-century conditions of an expanding bureaucratisation of the state in the service of capitalism.

In the third chapter, the book turns to the complex problem of the idea of ‘status’ posed to the norms and categories of classical legal thought. Rather than considering ‘status’ as antithetical to ‘contract’ in classical legal thought, the chapter presents the variations, dispersions, and contradictions of Henry Maine’s anthropological–legal textual corpus and the Punjab school of administration’s codification efforts presented to questions of status for an ‘Indian’ legal order. The author argues that complex negotiations over ideas of a ‘law of persons’ and its possible convergences with ‘a law of rights’ produced the category of ‘personal law’ as a law based on ascriptive group identities. Emerging as different from an identity of personhood, or a law of domestic relations, ‘status’ in British India in a certain sense aligned itself with, while also displacing, the core assumptions of right, will, and contract of the Anglo-common law. This critical episode of classical legal thought’s settlement with the anthropological discourse of status produced a long-lasting and significant codification of the subcontinent’s ‘non-private, non-market’ social space in terms of tense encounters of community identities and a collectivism of the state’s will in the regulation of these identities. The final chapter further exemplifies the peculiar forms of the law of status, and, by extension, classical legal thought in its globalised avatar, assumed under colonial conditions, by scrutinising more than half a century of case law and suits involving Parsi, Muslim, or Hindu spouses, through which the doctrine of conjugal restitution took shape in India. Chaudhry concludes that in this context the contractual theory of marriage grew within the law of status to produce opposed effects: ‘The doctrine’s underlying rationale thus remained constant even as its instrumental function shifted, having originated as a means for wives to assert power over their estranged husbands only to become the opposite, as men increasingly sought control over women through bringing suits for the restitution of their own conjugal rights’ (p. 426).

Chaudhry’s monumental work powerfully returns legal studies to critical jurisprudence, shifting focus from prevalent scholarly tendencies to dissolve law into the messiness of everyday practices. What one could expect, however, from Chaudhry in this book itself, is a philosophical statement on his avoidance of an archive of law in Asian languages and the question of the (im)possibility of either such an archive or the category in it.