Between litigation and arbitration: administering legal pluralism in Eighteenth-Century Bombay

Hodges, Leonard (2018) Between litigation and arbitration: administering legal pluralism in Eighteenth-Century Bombay. Itinerario 42 (3), pp. 490-515. ISSN 0165-1153.

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Official URL: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0165115318000633

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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