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.

A collection that focuses on the role of European law in colonial contexts and engages with recent treatments of this theme in known works written largely from within the framework of postcolonial studies, which implicitly discuss colonial deployments of European law and politics via the concept of ideology.