Events

Territorial Cessions to Despots in 19th-Century India and International Law Making

Speaker:
Dr Prabhakar Singh, Professor at the School of Law and Director of the Centre for International Law, BML Munjal University 

Discussant:
Dr Arvind Elangovan, Professor of History, School of Humanities and Cultural Studies, Wright State University

Moderator:
Dr Mathew John, Dean and Professor at the School of Law, BML Munjal University

This event will be held in hybrid mode at the CPR Conference Room and online via Zoom. Kindly register below to attend.

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Just as international law textbooks should take history more seriously, so should TWAIL (Third World Approaches to International Law) take nineteenth-century legal history seriously. TWAIL has paid little attention to the East India Company’s unusual cessions of territory to South Asian rulers in peacetime, as it tends to assume that colonial rule rested on territorial conquest. Under colonial constitutional law, these cessions raised questions in the British metropole about the legality of the Crown’s power to cede territory. South Asia saw two types of peacetime cession to kings and chiefs: those made (1) with parliamentary approval and (2) without it. British constitutionalists argued that the latter would set a “bad precedent” as despotic cessions, since “Indian necessities are peculiar, and cannot be judged by European precedents”. The talk will argue South Asia’s geography and legal order enforced secessions from the colonial government, which, in turn, fed the “Oriental despotism” debate and ultimately shaped the international law on territorial cession. 

About the speaker:
Dr Prabhakar Singh is a Professor at the School of Law, and the Director of the Centre for International Law, BML Munjal University, India. He was a visiting professor at the Geneva Graduate Institute, Switzerland, and at Ruhr University Bochum, Germany. He is a member of the Executive Council of the Asian Society of International Law and sits on the international advisory panel of the American Law Institute’s project on the Restatement of the Law (Fourth), The Foreign Relations Law of the United States. His opinion pieces have appeared in The Bangkok Post, The Telegraph (Kolkata), Deccan Herald (Bangalore) and The Mekong Review (Sydney). His fiction and poetry have appeared in Economic & Political Weekly (Mumbai) and The Bombay Review. 

About the discussant:
Dr Arvind Elangovan is a Professor of History of the School of Humanities and Cultural Studies at Wright State University, Ohio, USA. His research focuses on the political and constitutional history of South Asia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, nationalism, colonialism, comparative decolonisation and the history of political thought. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago and an MPhil from the Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He is the author of Norms and Politics: Sir Benegal Narsing Rau in the Making of the Indian Constitution, 1935-1950 (Oxford University Press, 2019). His articles have appeared in History Compass, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East and South Asian History and Culture. His writing for general readers has appeared in The Wire, Frontline, Hindustan Times, Economic and Political Weekly and Kafila.

About the moderator:
Dr Professor Mathew John is Dean and Professor at the School of Law, BML Munjal University, India. He holds graduate degrees in law from the National Law School of India University, Bangalore, and the University of Warwick, and completed his doctoral work at the London School of Economics on the impact of secularism on Indian constitutional practice. He is the author of India’s Communal Constitution: Law, Religion, and the Making of a People (Cambridge University Press, 2023). He previously worked at the Alternative Law Forum, Bangalore, on social justice lawyering. He was a Law and Culture Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore, and has been a visiting fellow at the Centre for the Study of Law and Governance, Jawaharlal Nehru University.