Paper short abstract:

This paper will study the shifts in the ideology and practices of rule as the colonial port city of Madras was transformed from a mercantilist city state to the territorial capital of the East India Company's southern Indian empire.

Paper long abstract:

This paper will study the shifts in the ideology and practices of rule as the colonial port city of Madras was transformed from a mercantilist city state to the territorial capital of the East India Company's southern Indian empire. It is possible to draw similarities between the ways in which this urban space with its racially and socially heterogeneous population was governed in the late 17th and 18th centuries, and the visions and forms of rule in other global commercial hubs including that of the Portuguese empire. By the late 18th century, however, a new conception of empire that was specifically linked to territory would fundamentally transform notions of space and governance.

I am interested in the quotidian arenas of early colonial law, formal and informal, that drew on older forms of mediation and arbitration even as they introduced new norms of evidence, rhetoric and performance. The ubiquitous invocation of the notion of "mamul" or custom for instance can be read in terms of a variety of registers and meanings that draw from pre-colonial understandings of legitimacy and antiquity as well speaking to the idea of precedent that was integral to a new, bureaucratic legal regime.

How did subaltern inhabitants of the city experience and negotiate the coming into place of this new legal regime? I suggest that this process at the crucial transformative period would allow these groups to articulate an understanding of themselves as productive urban residents of a colonial city, and as entitled subjects of the Company.