Hodges, Leonard (2018) Between litigation and arbitration: administering legal pluralism in Eighteenth-Century Bombay. Itinerario 42 (3), pp. 490-515. ISSN 0165-1153.
Abstract
This article uses the records of the Bombay Mayor’s Court (1728–1798) to explore the ways in which an ostensibly English court of law attempted to administer law in a way that was acceptable to a cosmopolitan cast of litigants. I show how, due to the Court’s popularity with Indian litigants, and the difficulties of its hybrid jurisprudence, the Court eventually moved to a model of formalised arbitration. In this arrangement, local Indian elites exercised considerable autonomy, while British judges gained an illicit commission. As such, the evidence from the Mayor’s Court points to a novel iteration of legal pluralism in which ill-defined legal regimes came to blur and blend with each other in a single forum. I argue that this forces us to reconceptualise solely jurisdictional definitions of legal pluralism, which must be complimented with the study of a court’s ‘jurispractice’.
Metadata
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| School: | Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of Historical Studies |
| Depositing User: | Lenny Hodges |
| Date Deposited: | 20 Jun 2022 12:40 |
| Last Modified: | 02 Aug 2023 18:16 |
| URI: | https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/48359 |
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