An Empire of Laws: Legal Pluralism in British Colonial Policy (Yale Law Library Series in Legal History and Reference)

A compelling reexamination of how Britain used law to shape its empire

For many years, Britain tried to impose its own laws on the peoples it conquered, and English common law usually followed the Union Jack. But the common law became less common after Britain emerged from the Seven Yearsâ War (1754â63) as the worldâs most powerful empire. At that point, imperial policymakers adopted a strategy of legal pluralism: some colonies remained under English law, while others, including parts of India and former French territories in North America, retained much of their previous legal regimes.

As legal historian Christian R. Burset argues, determining how much English law a colony received depended on what kind of colony Britain wanted to create. Policymakers thought English law could turn any territory into an anglicized, commercial colony; legal pluralism, in contrast, would ensure a colonyâs economic and political subordination. Britainâs turn to legal pluralism thus reflected the victory of a new vision of empireâauthoritarian, extractive, and tolerantâover more assimilationist and egalitarian alternatives. Among other implications, this helps explain American colonistsâ reverence for the common law: it expressed and preserved their equal status in the empire. This book, the first empire-wide overview of law as an instrument of policy in the eighteenth-century British Empire, offers an imaginative rethinking of the relationship between tolerance and empire.