Law and Politics in British Colonial Thought Transpositions of Empire

With the exhaustion of postcolonial studies, and following the historical turn in studies of European imperialism, the time is ripe for a more sharply historical consideration of the role of European legal thought in processes of colonial governance. Rather than recycling general theories of the ideological role of law in European colonization, the contributions to this volume focus on the historical interaction between law and politics in British colonial contexts in order to clarify how European legal doctrines and institutions were actually transmitted, negotiated and modified in the concrete circumstances of frontier polities.

Shaunnagh Dorsett is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Technology, Sydney. She researches at the intersections of legal history, history of political thought, and jurisprudence. She has written extensively on colonial governance, including on sovereignty, jurisdiction, and the legal settlement of Australia and New Zealand. Ian Hunter is an Australian Professorial Fellow in the Center for the History of European Discourses at the University of Queensland. He is a leading scholar in the history of early modern political, religious, and philosophical thought.