Law, Colonial Systems of

Law has never been marginal to colonialism. When European powers began expanding their wealth through the acquisition and possession of territories in the New World, they necessarily did so with appeals to law. Whether they used military means of conquest, economic ties of ceded territory and fortified trading posts, or "peaceful" agricultural settlement, the processes by which expansion and colonization occurred and within which it was framed "the discourse of legalities" (Tomlins 2001, p. 38).

Initially, there were no internationally recognized rituals of claiming ownership by right of discovery. These had to be established through contest. The discussion over legality, "the quest for an apparently unassailable legitimation" (Pagden 1998, p. 52) for acquiring new lands and resorting to violence when expedient, extended over more than two centuries and had an enduring impact on subsequent conceptions of empire. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, law was a technique of expansion as legal instruments recorded the facts of occupation and authorized colonizing ventures by private companies and groups.

The importance of law did not stop there. Colonies required administration; strategic decisions had to be made about how to introduce and extend legal control, and these gave rise to new forms of governance when law was imposed on newly acquired territories and subordinated peoples.

There was no single strategy employed. Possible strategies could and did include "aggressive attempts to impose legal systems intact" (Benton 2002, p. 2). But imposing top-down foreign law on other local legal systems was not the most obvious strategy followed. More commonly, in the interest of maintaining order, colonial administrators made conscious efforts to sustain indigenous legal forums and retain elements of existing legal institutions, thereby limiting the amount of legal change. European colonizers were in the process themselves of developing coherent systems of state law over alternative sources, such as customary and canon law, as they simultaneously expanded their borders. This fluid, complex, pluralistic model underscored the likelihood of multiple jurisdictions within colonial administrations.

Conquered and colonized groups, in turn, sought to respond to the imposition of law in ways that included accommodation, advocacy within the system, subtle delegitimation, and outright rebellion. These responses were compounded by factionalism and competition between colonial authorities. Thus, "multisided legal contests" were "central to the construction of colonial rule" (Benton 2002, pp. 2-3).

EARLY MODELS AND STRATEGIES: ROMAN AND CANON LAW

The impetus and basic model for colonization came from the Renaissance humanist fascination with Roman antiquity, which spread in the fifteenth century as Italian scholars became aware of the riches of classical antiquity. Although the English came later than other European powers to the project of empire building, they "were as much in thrall as the Spanish had been" to ancient models of Imperial grandeur (Pagden 1998, p. 35). Rome provided the model of imperial expansion through colonization. One of the first and most prominent theorists of colonization was Thomas Smith (1513–1577), professor of classics and law at Cambridge University, but he was one of many educated Europeans who were familiar with the idea that the Romans had advanced "their authority and civility throughout much of Europe" through colonization (Canny 1998, p. 7).

Ancient Rome also provided the European powers with the concepts and language of law. Although Islamic law must also have been influential on the development of ancient legal principles, by the Middle Ages Roman civil law … formed the basis for political and legal thought throughout Europe" (Stein 1999, pp. 66-67). In the thirteenth century, it combined with canon law and theology to become, for those who were in positions of authority, part of a common, shared learned culture. Roman law was then "readily exported … into areas that had never been part of the Roman Empire" (Stein 1999, p. 40). By the time Europeans were seeking expansion, the church was the main custodian of Roman legal tradition. The first step in developing an empire was to resort to the authority of the church.

Catholic powers, initially Spain, pursued their goals on the "highly questionable authority" of the pope, who in the Bulls of Donation of 1493 conceded to the Spanish monarchs the right to occupy new regions, even those yet to be discovered. Pope Alexander VI (1431–1503) in fact divided the New World between the first discoverers, Spain and Portugal. For the Protestant powers, the Netherlands and England, papal authority was unavailable, although similar terms were used by the English monarchs to endow their adventurers and explorers with the rights of conquering new lands.

Roman law had "indelibly impressed its character" on the legal and political culture and thought of Europeans (Stein 1999, p. 2). It was a foundational concept of classical imperialism that any expansionist state had to legitimate its actions by appeal to either natural or divine law. "In the terms accepted by every legal system of classical or Christian origin, acts of appropriation necessarily involved the denial of those rights which all men held by virtue of their condition as men. Every such act therefore had to be explained so as to render those natural rights invalid" (Pagden 1998, p. 37). Imperial ambition, enslaving the indigenous peoples, or occupying their territories had to be argued for, defended, and identified in the language of legality, and tensions between secular and religious law in European tradition gave particular form to these defenses.

Theories of legitimation that we now call colonialism served as both justification for past actions of "discovery" and exploration, and as motivation for further conquest and colonization. They were mobilized when exploitation and spoliation had occurred sufficiently to attract attention within or between either the European powers or the colonists themselves. At first, the European powers who saw themselves as conquerors legitimated their actions with appeals to religious theology.

By the Middle Ages canon law had developed as an independent judicial system whose authority over religious belief and practice extended to include marriage and family, military service, slavery, and on occasion economic and commercial behavior. It made sharp distinctions between the legal status of Christians and non-Christians (heretics, apostates, Jews) in their relations with each other and their ability to participate in legal proceedings and exercise authority. It was this aspect of legality that was most referred to in discussions of expansion, over the rights of conquest, the rights of conquerors to take possession, and the rights of conquered peoples.

To the question "by what right or warrant we can enter into the land of these Savages, take away their rightful inheritance … and plant ourselves in their place …?" posed by Englishman Robert Gray (c. 1580–c. 1640) in the early seventeenth-century (Pagden 1998, p. 37), expansionists held up principles of Christian religious belief that overrode natural law. Imperial expansion and territorial acquisition were to be based on a Christian obligation to convert the heathen. There were those who believed that non-Christians could not bear rights in property or sovereignty: therefore their territories and the persons of the indigenous people of the New World were to be forfeited to the first "godly" (i.e., Christian) person they encountered.

The Americas were not the only places Europeans established communities. Merchants, such as those in the Dutch East India Company trading in calico and spices, and ship-owners trading in slaves and gold, were pursuing trade with Asian and African ports on an unprecedented scale, which led to the establishment of commercial and administrative outposts in these areas. They could often be fortified communities, although they were not colonies as such and traders did not need to legitimate their practices. The few settlements established on the African coast before the nineteenth century were often held by agreements about rent or tributes paid to local indigenous rulers, and Asian settlements in places of trade and commerce such as India were acquired and held by treaty. It was not until expansion could only occur with prolonged warfare that legitimation became a pressing moral and political concern.

Until the thirteenth century, canon law had little interest in defining the relation between Christians and infidels outside Europe. After that date, however, it began to develop principles that limited the church's jurisdiction over infidels and simultaneously established a special responsibility of the church to intervene to protect natural law. These principles would be tested with colonial expansion into the New World.

Spain and Portugal on the eve of expansion in the fifteenth century had complex legal systems where different religious groups—Christians, Jews, and Muslims—coexisted with separate legal authorities and followed the laws of their own communities. Compounding this complexity further was the tension between local customary law and the superior claims of royal legal authority. This "complex legal landscape" (Benton 2002, p. 45) was made even more complicated as these countries moved into new areas of control.

European expansion in the sixteenth century presented "unprecedented problems" to legal scholars whose existing notions of law (drawn from codified customs and Roman law) were intertwined with Christian theology. A concept of ius gentium (law of people), a law shared by all the peoples, had previously been confined to Christian European countries under the power of both emperor and pope. Expansion beyond these boundaries brought non-Christian people into the purview of European law. Were they to be included? Did Christian Europeans have the legal right to usurp or adjudicate the crimes of non-Christian peoples? The answers to these questions were found through reference to natural law.

However, at the points of contact, legal adjudication and the administration of justice were often limited to the European community, despite the difficulty of maintaining boundaries between those and the indigenous inhabitants. Portugal delegated its legal authority to private venturers or the ship's captain, and only sporadically attempted to assert royal supervision. Consequently, non-Christian indigenes were treated as either living outside the law or were subjected to "virtually unregulated disciplinary excesses" (Benton 2002, pp. 46-47).

One person who addressed this problem was a Spanish Dominican professor of theology, Franciscus Vitoria (ca. 1483–1546), who in 1532 laid down important principles for the natural rights of the heathen infidels living in territories conquered by Spain. Roman law provided the concept of justice developed by Christian philosopher Thomas Aquinas (ca. 1225–1274), and was at the heart of the argument proposed by Vitoria on the rights held by indigenous people. Vitoria argued that ius gentium was not based on a shared religion but rather was built on the nature of humankind: it was a set of rules to govern relations between one group of people and another, and was "what natural reason had laid down among all peoples" (Stein 1999, pp. 94-95). Similarly, under natural law indigenous people fully owned their lands and could not be deprived of them against their will. While Vitoria seemingly championed indigenous rights, recent scholars have pointed to the triumphant imperialism internal to Vitoria's logic. Vitoria's principles also contained the seeds of domination.

COMMERCIAL AND PROPERTY LAW

Over the course of the sixteenth century, as trade became increasingly important, rationales supporting commercial interests supplanted those advocating religious doctrine. As European nation-states grew, the interests of the Crown intertwined with those of merchants, and colonies became widely accepted as an essential means of providing economic well-being to the populace. Acquiring new lands and ensuring the conduct of trade and commerce required rules and regulations binding on the parties and protecting merchants from competition and encroachment from rival powers. Conflict and competition meant early theoretical arguments that legitimated European conquest and laid down principles by which colonization could proceed. These principles subsequently became the foundation of modern international law.

Colonization means appropriation, taking possession. Important in taking possession are the techniques of planning, explaining, and justifying the action of appropriation, whether it be territory, trade routes, or resources. Once a territory had been conquered either for Christian or commercial purposes, the key problem of how to develop it and keep it as a colony also became a matter of legality.

Religion and commerce were important as motivations for colonization, but when the theorists of expansion discussed the processes of acquisition, "the measures necessary for the realization of colonization's essential processes" (Tomlins 2001, p. 28), they turned to the techniques of geography and law. Geography's methods of mapping and surveying enabled colonists to take possession of the areas the maps represented and named. Law provided the documents that enabled the areas mapped and surveyed to be fenced, bought and sold, defended with arms, and "used, taxed and inherited" (Tomlins 2001, p. 30).

By the seventeenth century and continuing well into the eighteenth century, the most persuasive and frequently cited argument favoring appropriation of aboriginal lands in America was the theory of property, derived from the Roman law of res nullius (no thing) and perpetuated most effectually by the English philosopher John Locke (1632–1704). Res nullius held all things that were empty, including lands that were "unoccupied," remained common property until they were put to use, usually agriculturally. Though it was not uncontested, especially by colonists with other agendas, Locke's position powerfully legitimated colonists' acquisition of indigenous territory through the authority of natural law rather than legislative decree. To combat the claims of other European powers, it had also to be yoked to claims of prior discovery, which in law constituted the initial step toward legitimate occupation. Claims of possession could only be sustained, however, by prolonged occupation (i.e., by the establishment of colonies).

Colonialism is the term for political and economic relationships that are established with colonization, but constructed and legitimized through ideologies of progression and racism. Colonialism is intricately historical in its effects. While the process of "cultural distancing" (Benton 2002, p. 13) was uniformly set in motion by colonizing powers claiming legal jurisdiction over new lands and people, the process itself differed substantially in practice. The legal system and background of the colonizing power on one hand conditioned the meaning, as well as the means, by which law was extended to conquered peoples. On the other hand, subordinated colonized people could use legal strategies to exploit the tensions and complications aroused by the colonial setting of any dispute. One such instance where the ambiguities of jurisdiction were evident and powerfully felt was the joint authority of Crown and church in the Spanish conquest of the Americas.

COLONIAL LAW AND CULTURE

In addition, "always, equally importantly and deeply," colonialism is a cultural process whose "discoveries and trespasses are imagined and energized through signs, metaphors and narratives" (Thomas 1994, p. 2). By the eighteenth century, colonialism was framed in terms of natural history, and by the nineteenth century in terms of an "overt, pervasive and extraordinarily confident racism, which was manifested in military operations … [And] in apartheid laws regulating marriage, residence and education" (Thomas 1994, p. 79). Not surprisingly the people who had been subjected to colonization "often perceived very clearly the close connections between jurisdictional claims and messages about cultural difference." Institutional frameworks that developed in colonial settings "link[ed] local cultural divisions to structures of governance" (Benton 2002, p. 15).

Law is implicated in colonialism as a technique of legitimation, authority, and dominance. It is also a sign system, language, and culture. Law could and did work both instrumentally in facilitating the colonial project and imaginatively as a resource of power and authority to be drawn on. It was in itself a language in which colonization could take place: "physical occupancy and legalized claim overlap[ped] as expressions of colonizing" (Tomlins 2001, p. 33). The charters given by the English monarch to establish colonies on the Chesapeake and in New England, for example, functioned to English audiences "as signs of colonization's legitimacy" and to the colonizers "as specifications of the process's limits and boundaries" (Tomlins 2001, p. 33).

Ensuring that the messages intended to be conveyed, through legal institutions and rituals, were indeed those actually received was always a problem for the colonizers. Within colonial encounters, cultural practices were often a result of interaction between colonizers and colonized, not necessarily of "domination" or "subordination," but rather the consequence of a complexity of cultural representation and interpretation and a sophistication in cultural adaptation. Colonialism also created new legal statuses as intermediaries acted to protect their interests against imposition by the colonial authorities, yet did so by acting within those very legal mechanisms, thereby simultaneously collaborating with the imposed legal order and yet resisting its effects.

Colonialism gave rise to particular state formations, such as, for example, settler societies, which are characterized by having nomadic or semi-nomadic indigenous populations displaced from the land and replaced with imposed formal centralized institutions of authority and government. Within these colonial states, conflicts often took the form of disputes about group rights and legal status, which in itself was a form of property. Where numbers mattered in the size and strength of the polity, indigenous subjects were held "inherently incapable of exercising the rights and responsibilities of citizenship" (Grimshaw 2001, p. 79).

The aim of the colonial project was to establish order, and colonial states were produced out of this "politics of legal ordering" (Benton 2002, p. 253), which could not be achieved without reference to previous local custom. Colonialism "required interaction" between the law that was being imposed and whatever indigenous law or custom already existed. The colonial state was an "arbiter over internal boundaries" in the face of "jockeying over alternative visions" of legal ordering (Benton 2002, p. 23).

Extending jurisdiction over new territories and new peoples created new relationships between the colonizers and the colonized, differences that were formalized in legal categories. Law also structured difference, "making rules about cultural interactions" (Benton 2002, p. 12). Jurisdiction marked new boundaries, made possible a shared identity of subjects before the law, and for colonizers and colonized to function within the law—as litigants, advocates, witnesses, and judges. Thus "the act of extending formal jurisdiction" (law) was frequently complex and difficult. "Colonizing groups in fact wished at times to restrict jurisdiction and thus to reinforce cultural divides" (Benton 2002, p. 12). In settler societies colonists expected political independence and democracy for themselves, often in advance of these developments occurring in their country of origin, yet they marginalized or excluded the indigenous people from those same "democratic" processes.

Nowhere was this more powerful than in the former English, Dutch, and German colonies in southern Africa, where formal union under a constitution into the Union of South Africa in 1910 brought in its wake the structuring of political rights on lines of racial difference. Through constitutional developments, court appointments, and racial legislation, the national government of this new country "showed, from the start, that it intended to govern in the interests of its white electorate" (Evans and Philips 2001, p. 91). New laws, passed almost immediately, reserved land for white ownership, entrenched an industrial color bar, removed existing political rights, and finally introduced full-fledged apartheid. Nonwhite voters were removed from electoral rolls, judicial and government institutions were "unscrupulously" manipulated, and all-white electorates elected all-white governments.

Such discriminations were resisted wherever they were set up. In some areas indigenous people struggled for inclusion on equal terms, other groups fought to maintain the legitimacy of their own legal forums. (Benton 2002, p. 12). "Colonial rule magnified jurisdictional tensions," as the presence of cultural "others" challenged existing legal categories and exposed ambiguities in the law (Benton 2002, p. 253).

As settlement grew in the new areas following their colonization, settlers expected to be governed in the manner of metropolitan European governance (e.g., "claiming the rights of Englishmen" and developing categories of exclusion, hierarchies, and boundaries between populations). Law furnished the "means to design and implement those relationships" and "provided a potent medium for the imposition of meaning on the activities engendered" (Tomlins 2001, p. 29). Within colonial domains, law created the relationships and routines of social interaction, established authoritative identities, and constructed the culture within which human purpose, "habits of living," and "objects of industry" were constituted (Tomlins 2001, p. 30). Law had material importance.

Property and trade were central to colonial interests. At times "seemingly irrelevant cases of inheritance or marriage property could quickly become crucial to the production of labor, revenue collection, or the regulation of land markets" (Benton 2002, p. 22). Colonial states defined sites for setting rules about property and social identity and enforced definitions of property as it also acted to regulate exchanges. Simultaneously, laws of property, commerce, and civic duty in European countries developed concomitantly with the growth of those nation-states as imperial powers. Colonialism structured legal ordering within the metropolitan centers, as well as in the colonies where "local … elites often ran ahead of colonial administrators," for example, "in advocating a greater role for the colonial state in regulating property transactions of all kinds" (Benton 2002, p. 23). This in turn reflected back to the colonial power.

Nevertheless, colonial legal cultures exhibited localized variations conducive to an idea of colonialisms rather than a singular concept. While law could sometimes be used instrumentally, for most circumstances it is better understood as "an imaginative resource" that was "inherently ambivalent, contradictory" and not always in the control of colonial administrators (Tomlins 2001, p. 37). The act of colonizing required the movement of people, not just the process of legally claiming territory. It therefore also conveyed identifiable legal cultures distinguished by local variation, depending on where colonists came from and which stratum of society they belonged to. Law was something common people participated in; it was part of popular culture. Their usage of the law, and the meanings they attached to it, helped shape the diversity within law even within similar colonies.

Colonialism was not simply "a crushing progress" of triumph for the colonizers (Kirkby and Coleborne 2001, p. 3). There were also significant contradictions between policy, such as "rhetorical commitment[s] to equality among British subjects" formulated back in Europe or the British Colonial Office, and practice on the edges of empire where it "was often far less enthusiastically endorsed by settlers and administrators …" (Evans and Philips 2001, p. 94). Issues were perceived differently in different centers of power. A question such as that of extending the franchise (the right to vote) "held a more particular immediacy for Europeans in colonial communities … than it ever could for politicians and colonial officials in Britain" (Evans and Philips 2001, p. 94). It also represented different significance. In the colonies the franchise was "a potent indicator" of the colonists' anxiety "to maintain exclusive [white] minority rule" but a "measure of the Home Government's unwillingness to redress such discrimination in practice" (Evans and Philips 2001, p. 94).

COLONIAL ENCOUNTERS WITH INDIGENOUS AND LOCAL LAW

Encounters with local indigenous systems of law also prevented the imposition of a singular legal authority or a unitary colonialism. By 1820 a quarter of the world's population lived within Britain's empire. The continent of Africa was being carved up between the major imperial European powers of that time—France, Germany, and Britain. The nineteenth century was the great period of empire: the period when the largest proportion of the world's population lived under direct colonial rule. But this does not mean colonial power was unlimited. Introduced institutions were frequently appropriated to strategic effect by colonized peoples.

Colonial histories were shaped by indigenous responses of resistance and accommodation to colonization, as much as by the imposition of power from metropolitan authorities and local officials adhering to or departing from policy and previous practice. The colonizers, as well as the colonized, were exposed to new possibilities of action and departure from Old World corruptions. This was particularly the case within the English colonies of North America, where law became the medium of social transformation when colonists resisted the imposition of imperial constraints and asserted their legal independence through a newly acquired identity.

Similarly, in the common law jurisdiction in the Australian penal colony of New South Wales, colonists, whether convict or free, enjoyed access to the courts and economic freedoms denied to their counterparts in the imperial center. Married women, who in English law were denied economic rights and legal personhood under the common law doctrine of coverture, were in the colonies permitted to engage in economic activities, even to buy and sell land, as colonial societies developed congruently and in relationship with, yet independently of, the metropole.

The presence of indigenous populations and the political and symbolic importance of defining their legal status provided the biggest challenge to the colonial imposition of unitary legal authority and "stretched across the colonial world" (Benton 2002, p. 253). As Europeans encountered peoples who were non-Christians, legal boundaries closely following ethnic and cultural boundaries were "an important constraint and rhetorical resource used in shaping ethnic identities" (Benton 2002, p. 78). Thus, cultural difference—and relationships of power based on this difference that we call colonialism—became the heart of political difference in the development of the modern world.

Not least, European imperialism created new sites for struggle within and between indigenous and European women and men. Miscegenation complicated cultural categories, legal status, and property rights as it tied colonizers and colonized together in familial and kinship ties, as well as in economic and political obligation. It presented particular problems to the existing question for the colonizers of how and to whom to apply law.

To the usual problems of evidence and corroborating witnesses in cases of rape was added the problem of non-Christians taking oaths of truth-telling in courtrooms. Europeans did not expect to adhere to or be judged by tribal law, nor did they want to litigate in indigenous courts where such courts existed. At times, European colonizers sought to interfere with legal prohibitions where traditional practices were thought to be morally unacceptable. Colonial rule thus proceeded amidst "myriad conflicts over the definitions of difference, property, and moral authority" (Benton 2002, pp. 127-129). The outcome was inevitably unresolved and unresolvable.

Many of the legal issues of colonialism remain. In the twentieth century, law continued to shape colonized societies even after the colonial era was officially ended by the United Nations. Law was perceived as an instrument of development, capable of bringing about far-reaching social change through the constitution of modern nationstates and the facilitation of finance capital. Yet, in practice law could instead maintain structures and perpetuate conflicts that were instituted under colonialism. Here continuities with colonialism suggest that law, rather than being a legacy of the colonialist past, may more profitably be seen as "a living instrument for the reproduction of imperial international relations" (D'Souza 2001, p. 257). Contests over law are constitutive of larger international relationships. In the globalized world today, even "seemingly small struggles over cultural boundaries in the law" have the potential to profoundly affect power structures everywhere (Benton 2002, p. 265).

Indeed the legal politics that shaped the "global ordering" of the modern world continue in the contemporary postcolonial era as indigenous people of former colonies challenge the internal legal authority of the states in which they live with "competing legal pluralisms" (Benton 2002, p. 264). At the same time, the rise of transnational associations demands alternative jurisdictional boundaries. Colonialism is now implicated in the writing of the history of those nation-states that were once colonies, as scholars debate the legitimacy and accuracy of territorial acquisition by "peaceful" settlement, and legal authorities contest the very concept of "sovereignty"—whose "simple conjuring is held to change an ancient peoples' relationship with its land" (Borrows 2001, p. 190)—that has undermined indigenous ownership since the fifteenth century.

see also Divide and Rule: The Legacy of Roman Imperialism; Law, Colonial Systems of, British Empire; Law, Colonial Systems of, French Empire; Law, Colonial Systems of, Spanish Empire; Religion, Roman Catholic Church.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Benton, Lauren. Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–1900. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Borrows, John. "Because it does not make sense': Sovereignty's Power in the Case of Delgamuukw v. The Queen 1997, in Law, History, Colonialism: The Reach of Empire, edited by Diane Kirkby and Catharine Coleborne, 190-206. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2001.

Canny, Nicholas, ed. The Oxford History of the British Empire, Vol. 1: The Origins of Empire: British Overseas Enterprise to the Close of the Seventeenth Century. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1998.

D'Souza, Radha. "International Law—Recolonizing the Third World? Law and Conflicts Over Water in the Krishna River Basin," in Law, History, Colonialism: The Reach of Empire, edited by Diane Kirkby and Catharine Coleborne, 243-260. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2001.

Evans, Julie, and David Philips. ' "When there's no safety in numbers': Fear and the Franchise in South Africa—the Case of Natal, in Law, History, Colonialism: The Reach of Empire, edited by Diane Kirkby and Catharine Coleborne, 91-105. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2001.

Fitzpatrick, Peter. "Terminal Legality: Imperialism and the [De]composition of Law," in Law, History, Colonialism: The Reach of Empire, edited by Diane Kirkby and Catharine Coleborne, 9-25. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2001.

Grimshaw, Patricia, Robert Reynolds, and Shurlee Swain. "The Paradox of Ultra-democratic Government: Indigenous Civil Rights in Nineteenth-century New Zealand, Canada and Australia," in Law, History, Colonialism: The Reach of Empire, edited by Diane Kirkby and Catharine Coleborne, 78-90. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2001.

Pagden, Anthony. "The Struggle for Legitimacy and the Image of Empire in the Atlantic to c.1700," in The Oxford History of the British Empire, Vol. 1: The Origins of Empire: British Overseas Enterprise to the Close of the Seventeenth Century, edited by Nicholas Canny, 34-54. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Seuffert, Nan, and Catharine Coleborne, eds. Making Law Visible: Past and Present Histories and Postcolonial Theory. Special issue, Law Text Culture 7 (2003).

Stein, Peter. Roman Law in European History. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Stoler, Ann Laura. "Rethinking Colonial Categories: European Communities and the Boundaries of Rule." In Colonialism and Culture, edited by Nicholas Dirks, 319-352. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992.

Thomas, Nicholas. Colonialism's Culture: Anthropology, Travel, and Government. Melbourne, Australia: Melbourne University Press, 1994.

Tomlins, Christopher, "Law's Empire: Chartering English Colonies on the American Mainland in the Seventeenth Century," in Law, History, Colonialism: The Reach of Empire, edited by Diane Kirkby and Catharine Coleborne, 26-45. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2001.

Young, Robert. Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2001.