I will ask Nishank to begin his presentation. I would give everybody a warning.
Five minutes before they are due to to wrap up, and we will have some discussion after each paper.
If time remains at the end, we may have some general reflections or considerations upon the panellists.
OK, Nishank, you have the floor. Hey, thank you so much.
Let me begin by thanking the organisers for letting me present at this conference, which has so many exciting and stimulating papers.
I could not have hoped for a better chance than Provincia Guha,
who has blazed bites for so many of us to follow across various dreamscapes in the Bombay they took my paper today forms a part of my Ph.D. research.
It is very much work in progress and I would welcome your comments and criticism on it as we go along.
So as a lawyer by training, I have, in the words of Phoebe Thompson,
parachuted into the 19th century and the world of the English East India Company, and I hope to use this opportunity to discuss my work.
My research is situated in imperial and social legal history, with a focus on the institutional culture of the company, both at home and in India.
In particular, I am concerned with how legal and bureaucratic structures mediated between engagements between incarnation and the company.
The title of this paper, Government of India,
is a phrase that in 1824 report by Commissioner William Chaplin used to describe the company government in Canada.
He says that the companies government of India has kept readers in check.
I argue that this is not merely a rhetorical notion, but although it is often hazy, it is in ways very oddly specific.
I attempt to sketch some features of what this government order means by setting the
capital punishment practises in the commissioner's territories in the Bombay Necronomicon,
which I would refer to as the Commissioner Editors.
Circulation and control feature in my paper, not only how they were deployed by British officials to balance subjects,
and they ruled already in India, but also how these officers themselves were subject to imperial circulation and control through the operation of.
Seeing the iteration of order as part of the legal system, rather than merely the manifestation of statecraft is something that saturates,
the commissioner stated, sees not only as a local unit, but actually a form of government in the broader imperial right that the company inhabiting.
And there are some references to violence and certain terms that they use in today's presentation may be problematic.
I do sort of intend to use them because they are used in the archival choices and part of the project is really
to look at how communities which have so far been ignored as legal actors exercised agency in the past.
So this is the East India company headquarters played in the street.
This is significant because today this is the site of the Lloyds Bank headquarters.
Allied Bank recently announced that they do admit and apologise for their role in slavery across the Atlantic.
And they are currently looking at archival material to explore these linkages further.
This becomes significant in the context of a company in there because India is often looked at as Britain's second empire.
The term the English East India Company can be a bit of a misnomer.
A lot of the officials I referred to in my Scottish from the legal perspective,
1813 is a crucial Indian because that is when the company loses its monopoly to trade with India.
And since 1793, the British parliament has been increasingly interfering and scrutinising the role that the company plays to my
legal history has frequently been involved in looking at top level administrative structures and how they work.
My attempt is to build on these anti-imperialist scholarship,
which looks at the functioning of officials close to the ground and how their ratings and their actions actually constituted a framework for long.
Doing so helps to develop sort of care about subnational undercurrents and local dynamics.
And I intend to do this for the communist entities. So very briefly, just a sort of overview of the company's hierarchy,
the Board of Control is something that the British parliament set up to oversee the activities of the company.
The commissioner is in office, established under the Governor-General initially and then later under the Bombay government from 1819 onwards.
The collecting political agent is sort of the key focus for my presentation.
Many of you will be familiar with Mount Stuart,
and since he was the first commissioner and subsequently becomes the governor of Bombay and is thereafter sort
of instrumental in authoring a report which bridges practises and East India company practises in the 1819.
John Briggs, again, perhaps some of you are familiar with this version.
He is the first connected and political agent in Standish later in his life.
He is of great significance for these translations of works from question and somebody.
So some of you did referred to Forrest as well in Spanish and also a memoir of Nunavut.
Newish Briggs occupies many, many different offices and roles in English and then thereafter, later in India.
Briggs is a character of continuing interest.
I hope to work on a legal biography of John Briggs in the coming year, and I'd welcome any sort of comments from passionate,
in-body scholars about this condition to the U.S. where it's located.
Property would be approximately this region in company records referred to very often as a region
which has disorder and confusion preceding the decade of the Anglo-American was a pre company.
Scholarship demonstrates that this actually would not have been the case, necessarily, but this is how company records to describe it very often.
It's important strategically and economically because it forms a link between Hindustan and the.
There is also the Bombay Agra Road, which passes through Kennish in later in the 19th century.
It has challenging power in climate politics.
A lot of hilly regions, lots of forested areas and polities who are not always friendly towards the company.
So while this may seem like a little bit of a political hodgepodge,
as this sort of map of Canada is needed in the 18th century demonstrates, it is ringed by various subtleties.
The whole goes backwards. That's India, Indonesia.
There are also smaller units so that the states have naturally planned numerous health chiefs who occupy different regions in tarnish.
That is, however, partly a legal structure, which is already well established within the presidency, down to be 18 or.
Image is of Indian law officials in the Bombay presidency in the Bombay.
This does not necessarily apply to the commissioners territories, and we'll talk about that in just a moment.
But the top level that presents Hindu law, which has been in the lower level, represent Muslim.
There is also a fairly well-established British legal system for Bombay.
They shouldn't see which has jurisdiction over Europeans who live there and within the rest of the state.
This has British qualified lawyers who act as judges in the limits of the Bombay presidency.
Again, this is distinct from the commissioner stated within the commissioner's territory.
There is this sort of political and judicial hierarchy as far as policing and legal functions are concerned.
So the collective really is the linchpin of company government in the commissioner stated.
The boxes in blue are British officials, the ones in green eyes, Indian officials or others who engage with the company in various capacities.
The collector very often also has military integrity of them, are actually military officers,
and they do conduct court martial that dictates that within jurisdictions which are not always very clear, we will try to do that in just a moment.
From the twenty, there are criminal judges to the judges are appointed for the commissioners, David devotees who travel on circuit.
Again, these are not legally trained individuals,
but these are companies who will challenge who are supposed to relieve the collector of a lot of judicial burden.
I also want to emphasise that the collector is very heavily dependent on his Indian charity stuff.
So the Who's Your Country again staffed largely by Brahmins and other district level officials and
village level officials without which really this system of company government would not have functioned?
And there are limits as far as how much of the local headquarters actually influences things that happen elsewhere in the province of Cavendish.
To the heart of this, as an eager historian is on the issue of jurisdiction.
These are very hazy and often overlapping. Unlike other places across the imperial world and even somewhere in the presidency,
thousands, a lot of these are not formally assigned through instrumental commissions.
These are arrogated buys which flow from office, and these are very often ad hoc.
There are no instruments of appointment unknown to the commission, which are issued.
Ironically, the commissioner himself does not Typekit commission,
but it is only alleged that insurance the writes to him and his private secretary to the governor general of India.
And this becomes a problem later on. When and since then becomes government attention decisions under him for review.
So there is an opinion which is charged from the advocate general of Bombay,
who then is in British Oxford qualified lawyer, who then validates this system and then recommends a few safeguards.
It also found that many of the collectors actually been sworn into office,
so retrospectively they do get sworn in as justices of the peace and as magistrate.
But as you can see, there is a lot of ad hoc ism and allocation, which is what is taking place in terms of how this nation works.
Now there are multiple areas in which jurisdiction exercised and.
As we said before, so most of these collectors in the commissioning stages of military officers, so they have the power to convene court martials.
They don't always do that to a number of executions do take place in time.
They shred believe there is no discernible legal fora, which is convened,
and Briggs is involved in at least three and four 41, which oblige because he had been staged by a priority above him.
Rebellion is a very sort of amorphous category which is used to to hold all of these things in
and a number of civilians identified by military officers under the guise of being debated.
There is a notion of martial law which is talked about, not necessarily always invoked.
I'd like to refer you to any man's work on martial law and disorder that it occupies and how it's
different from this very clear distinction between military and civilian in the U.K. at the same.
Criminal jurisdiction is something really that forms a very large part of maybe, he said, at least in this aspect.
So a lot of these deals with organised crime show the gangs or highway robbery that dealt with that a number of murder cases,
political integration, but through raids and robberies, which may have taken place earlier, is now treated as crime.
And again, I just got here as well.
Bush looks at bill criminal activity attempted to be negotiating, which is understood differently by the company government FBI.
Robinson's work is actually very, very interesting because he actually delves into a lot of the trial records around which to deal with this.
I civil jurisdiction, I mean, again, not relevant initially for the death penalty,
but only affects a very limited number of of people mostly illiterate landed this huge condition fact is notoriously lacking in this chaplain.
That begs for this saying that the lack of civil litigation is possibly a sign of corruption,
and he required to address that and said there is talk of political jurisdiction also, which has many boundaries with the judiciary.
So a number of the chiefs of Central Asian countries and it is later realise that
they've never been tried to ascend to and then diminish what they should do,
which is an end. And about seventy two people die within a month of them reaching that, and it's literally never even tried.
Five minutes left. Shut. So groups which have been noticed by the judicial consultations who are Hindus, includes many, many other communities as.
Deals are classified under that. This sort of binary between Hindus and Muslims is interesting and important because there are no
official who determine how this is what sort of religious practises are to be followed in sentencing.
Women particularly are noted in the consultation because the question of whether
women can be sentenced to death is something that keeps doing the rounds.
The commissioner is keen that this be implemented,
but he faces opposition from the Bombay government against a different system for British civilians and shortages.
So contrary to that of enquiries about corruption, those around the death penalty face very little scrutiny and very little process.
So this some teams to underscore from from what I looked at before is how these guys are vested and
how these by have super racial ideology legible to authorities higher up in the company hierarchy.
There are many instances of coercion,
and this follows Socio-Economic and perhaps not very different from the criminal justice system, and it seems to exist today.
There are numerous anxieties about religious law and norms of banishment again,
while there are works of codification right there, work of digesting some of these laws into usable manuals.
These very rarely get used and there is and heavy reliance on religious issues and very quickly talk about the case of Naik.
He was a man who Briggs executed. He had hot claims.
He claims that he was not fully compensated.
That he has promised pensions but only got a part of them and raided company villages in protest when he's called to account for this.
He attended the archive described as an incident later, and he justified his rage.
So this is the content of his letter. So he makes this claim to write and says that you ask us not to plant every day.
They don't really provide for us. Please read to the restaurant to eat and leave has to feed a man with leave and then grass is an admirable plan.
Should there are disputes about whether or not he actually said and as he admits to this letter and rage,
he's hanged on the direction of John Briggs and then not, and he notes that a deceiver with instructions from its instant to do this.
And he should have executed somebody,
either Bill Knight adopt different strategies you can and should make escape
from countries to get a gun from John Malcolm and then return to condition
and negotiate with Big Monday night before the execution has actually obtained an agreement and then to be negotiated later of his successor.
Archibald Robertson actually does try him and then transport him to a bear named the consequences to John Briggs,
as I guess you can imagine, are not very severe.
So the directors do, almost with a half decade later, talk about his treatment of unique and scathing terms, but nothing really, really happens.
Briggs is already moved away from carnage by the time this Dispatches enquiry finds no fault in his actions,
and Elphinstone essentially endorses the system that he creates as commissioner.
So, I mean, this is just an image, which is the symbolic sort of representation of the nib breaking at the end of a capital sentence.
So while this will conclude, the show sort of flattens the relations between the likes and the company,
it actually does tells a story of a much more complicated and intricate pattern of negotiation and dealings.
So that is run out of time.
Yes, absolutely. Can I decide if in fact it.
And to that is absolutely concluding in seconds.
So I contend that legal authority was unconstrained by actual insular to so in
the attempt to continue without high institutions and not follow British law,
the electors were not really bound by any external or legal precedent and essentially
indulged in ad hoc proceedings which created the so-called government of order.
Thank you.