Moving away from the grassroots version of events, this chapter explores the official colonial narratives created about the 1935 rebellions and the nature of British imperialism, arguing that the colonial government essentially operated as an extension of the sugar estates. Because of the entrenchment of racial stereotypes, the cross-racial cooperation fundamental to the rebellions seemed implausible to colony officials and was therefore rendered invisible. This chapter demonstrates the racial and ideological anxieties of colonialism itself and the global fractures within the British Empire during this period, where activists made connections between fascism and colonialism.

This chapter focuses on the very popular category of labels featuring royalty. Swedish match factories produced relatively few labels featuring the Swedish royal family, as the subject was considered too lowbrow. Swedish match manufacturers did, however, routinely issue labels commemorating British royal appointments, ceremonies and the British royal family more generally. These royal labels are featured in this chapter. This chapter also includes a history of the development of copyright law in Sweden, and the impact it had on the reproduction of official royal portraits and photographs that were used on these matchbox labels.

Matchbox labels were the perfect vehicle for propaganda. Small and portable, matchboxes were easy to distribute and carry. This facilitated the spread of propaganda messages across borders through the labels that adorned them. This chapter puts a spotlight on the labels that were used to push political interests and agendas, including those that promoted the British Empire and its mission.

A product of the materials available in the New Europe Group’s archive, which includes personal diaries and journals, this chapter is able to provide a more intimate look at three of its most influential female members: Winifred Gordon Fraser, Cecil Eastgate, and Rose Graham. The mini-biographies of these women give us a deeper understanding of why women were drawn into the federalist movement. All three were well-educated world travelers who had a vested interest in advocating for women to have greater agency and self-sufficency. Their personal backgrounds also provide valuable context for assessing their views on gender and the significance of women in politics found in Chapter 8.

The introduction sets the stage for the story told in this book about the comparative history of legal education and legal theory in colonial India and Mandatory Palestine during the early twentieth century. The book challenges the assumption that non-Western legal scholars were merely passive recipients of Western ideas. Instead, it argues that Hindu and Jewish legal thinkers, shaped by nationalist ideologies and responding to the crisis of liberal individualism, actively engaged with contemporary Western legal theories to contest Western portrayals of their religious legal traditions, as part of a broader non-Western jurisprudential wave, which also appeared in places such as Egypt and China. The introduction discusses the contribution of the book to the global history of jurisprudence and legal theory, the history of comparative law, and the study of the relationship of religious law and politics. It also provides an overview of the structure of the book.

This chapter considers the evolution of English policy towards Ireland from the sixteenth century onwards. It argues how, at the beginning of the seventeenth century and the important reign of James VI and I, there was a renewed emphasis on religion, specifically Protestant evangelisation, as a key part of colonial projects, with Ireland part of wider trends in developing English imperialism. This resulted in policies of ‘converting and civilising’, with concepts of civility becoming inextricable with the Protestant religion. This was made visible in the planning and requirements of plantation schemes such as Ulster, which is contrasted with earlier schemes’ more lax religious requirements. The stress on religion, in turn, generated Irish Catholic resistance, which also drew on religious arguments, justifications and imagery in resisting the dispossession, displacement and loss of power that plantations represented. The Catholic clergy were crucial actors in articulating this religiously inflected opposition. The effect of both plantation and challenges to it was the increasing voicing of grievances, across a range of issues, in religious terms and through religious categories.

In the Indian, Arabian, and Malay seafaring worlds, the burden of ‘piraticality’ fell upon successive sets of maritime and littoral communities. As seen through the prism of the colonial archive, the sailors of these societies inhabited a dynamic frontier of imperial expansion, beginning in India in the eighteenth century, and pushing outwards from the shores of the subcontinent. Building from recent reinterpretations of the sea as a category of historical analysis, this introduction charts the emergence and transformation of piracy as a concept, spilling out from the early-modern Atlantic into the Indian Ocean. Moving beyond the more familiar pirates who positioned themselves within and between competing seaborne empires in the Caribbean and Atlantic, this study considers piracy instead as a projected category of imperial encounter. Across the Indian Ocean world, ‘pirates’ lost the individuality associated with their Atlantic counterparts, causing entire communities to be defined by their immutable characteristics—cast in terms of race and geography, as temporally inert and irredeemably backward, incapable of modernising except by the violence of purportedly enlightened empires.

This chapter looks at the relationship between papyrology and race from a historical and disciplinary perspective. European imperialism, from Napoleon’s expedition onwards, enabled the legal and illegal transfer of a hundred thousand papyrus fragments from Egypt to Europe and North America. The process was sustained by White race supremacy ideas, which most scholars embraced, according to which Egyptians and their Ottoman ruling elite were incapable of appreciating the real meaning of antiquities, including manuscripts, putting at risk their preservation. The accumulation and archival of papyri in European and North American collections went hand in hand with a programmatic exclusion of Egyptians from studying the material and was functional to the creation of a new academic field, papyrology, controlled by White classicists. The chapter’s conclusion opens question about future directions, regarding both colonial collections and institutional inequality.

Thes chapter argues that both Britons and South Asians made use of instruments such as treaties and a broader world of diplomatic paperwork to construct a framework for interstate legality in the eighteenth century. South Asian efforts to make and remake arrangements with British traders and government agencies constituted a source of inter-imperial legal forms. Inter-imperial treaties were not blunt instruments of European imperialism, but legal documents co-produced by South Asian bureaucrats. By emphasising the activism and political thought of South Asian actors in their pursuit of a new inter-imperial order, this chapter rethinks the focus on European actors as the architects of international law. Of course, multilingual and multipolar claim making did not impose a stable legal order in South Asia. Treaties were regularly abrogated and renegotiated. Nevertheless, such efforts to negotiate relationships among states and enshrine them punctuated and shaped the upheavals of the eighteenth century as well as the explosion of new projects of state building. Inter-imperial lawmaking emerged as a vital site for politics in the eighteenth century.

This chapter situates sovereignty at the heart of the relationship between international law and empire. I examine the ways in which the concept was defined to exclude non-European peoples while remaining alert to the complexities posed to such exclusionary definitions by the variety of polities that existed during the heyday of European imperialism. Colonial South Asia, with its melange of political units, provides an excellent illustration of this complicated relationship. I explore the diverse articulations of sovereignty in this region along two axes: temporal and categorical. At least three sets of constituents – British officials, rulers and bureaucrats of semi-sovereign entities such as princely states, and anticolonial nationalists in British India – used the language of sovereignty to debate and resolve political problems. I trace their definitions over time. By examining these actors and their legal arguments, we can understand how sovereignty in colonial South Asia transitioned from notions of layered sovereignty to more territorial forms, although pluralist ideas continue to have long afterlives in postcolonial South Asia.

Chapter 1 examines connections between abolition debates and legislation in Britain and the decisions of colonial administrations to amend, retain or abolish the death penalty in the 1950s and 1960s. The British government made only limited efforts to promote abolition across the Empire and readily accepted arguments made by governors, political and judicial appointees and elected lawmakers for retaining executions. The course of imperial abolition was consequently uneven in ways that reflected the diversity of colonial legal and penal cultures, crime control concerns, constitutional arrangements and political dynamics, and which saw racialized systems of colonial penal violence persist into the abolition era. Yet even in colonies where the death penalty was retained into the 1970s and beyond, death sentences were upheld in an increasingly narrow range of murder cases. In some jurisdictions, this shift predated British abolition and indicates a more pervasive and dispersed turn against capital punishment across the Empire than is captured in statute laws alone.

The Introduction outlines the book’s central concern with the practice and abolition of the death penalty in British colonies from the 1960s to the 1990s. It traces the development of the royal prerogative of mercy during the first half of the twentieth century and explains factors that influenced the colonial clemency process prior to abolition of the death penalty in Britain in 1965. It also introduces the competing pressures imposed on British death penalty policy by decolonisation and the development of capital punishment as a global human rights concern in the late twentieth century. Finally, it discusses the primary sources on which the study is based, explains the scope of the research and summarises each chapter.