Lisa Ford

Rage for Order: The British Empire and the Origins of International Law, 1800–1850

Lauren Benton and Lisa Ford’s jointly-written book is slim in size – 197 pages of text, 74 of notes – but expansive in scope and interpretative ambition. It is a dense, complex piece of history, frequently operating on several levels at once. It asks us to rethink the study of international legal history in fundamental ways, not least by redrawing the boundaries between imperial, international, and global legal regimes. The authors pursue these arguments through an exploration of a series of overlapping projects of legal reform which took place within the British empire, and on its peripheries, in the first half of the 19th century. The book’s methodological claims are compelling; its contentions about the British imperial constitution are powerful, but not wholly persuasive. Approached, however, as a book about a set of themes – rather than as an authoritative treatment of specific problems – Rage for Order represents an immensely significant intervention in a wide range of debates.

Learning Outcomes Assessment and History: TEQSA, the after Standards Project and the QA/QI Challenge in Australia.

Higher education in Australia is currently in a state of flux, with the Federal Government’s Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency commencing operations in January 2012. The ‘After Standards Project’ has been working with Australian university history departments and the Australian Historical Association, educating and empowering the discipline to act as a united community and assert ownership of a standards process. This article provides a stocktake of the achievements and challenges the After Standards Project has faced in coming to terms with the new environment and resultant new demands around compliance and accountability. It discusses the After Standards Project’s work in terms of both quality assurance and quality improvement, with reference to the establishment of a set of discipline standards and the trial of an accreditation scheme.

APPLYING STANDARDS TO TERTIARY-LEVEL HISTORY: POLICY, CHALLENGES AND THE AFTER STANDARDS PROJECT

This paper discusses the challenges of applying standards to the teaching of tertiary-level history. It gives a critical overview of the emerging standards process in Australia, re-emphasising the importance of disciplinary input in producing a workable and acceptable regulatory framework under the aegis of Australia’s recently-established Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA). To this end, it argues for the importance of building capacity within the history discipline both to engage with policy makers in coming months, and to take an active role in defining and implementing national standards for tertiary history. It suggests the potential of grassroots initiatives such as the After Standards project to assist historians in meeting this challenge. This article has been peer-reviewed

Anti-Slavery and the Reconstitution of Empire

This survey article combines some recent scholarship on anti-slavery with work on humanitarianism and legal history to explore ways in which anti-slavery fed into the legal transformation of the British Empire in the first decades of the nineteenth century. It argues that campaigns for abolition, emancipation, and the amelioration of slavery did more than use law as a means to the end of slave emancipation. Anti-slavery efforts were integral to a larger process of imperial legal reordering: they often aimed, and invariably worked, to transform the legal relationship among subjects, colonial states and the imperial centre.

‘Mr Peel’s Amendments’ in New South Wales: Imperial Criminal Reform in a Distant Penal Colony

ABSTRACT This article investigates the difficult interface between metropolitan legal reform and empire in the late 1820s. In 1828, the Supreme Court of New South Wales sentenced dozens of men to death under legislation that had been repealed in Britain. It then insisted that every one of them be set free. This mess raised a fundamental question agitated in different ways around the empire in that decade: to what degree should colonial subjects enjoy the benefits of modernized metropolitan criminal law? Even as successive local and metropolitan Acts imposed new constraints on the civil rights of convicts in New South Wales, the Supreme Court insisted that even the most notorious recidivists in the colony should be protected against the Bloody Code from the moment it was reformed at home. In doing so, the court ignored the terms of section 1 of the Criminal Statutes Repeal Act passed at the request of a former East India Company officer to preserve the operation of the Code in India. Thus the peculiar reception controversy in New South Wales shows not only how disruptive metropolitan reform could be for colonies, it performed a growing racial gap in the imagination of legal subjecthood in different corners of empire.

Legal Change, Convict Activism and the Reform of Penal Relocation in Colonial New South Wales: The Port Macquarie Penal Settlement, 1822–26

This article investigates how imperial legal reforms and convict activism combined to challenge the expanding system of internal ‘removal’ and ‘transportation’ in New South Wales during the 1820s. In particular, it explores how prisoners at the Port Macquarie penal settlement disputed the legal foundations of sentencing by colonial magistrates, contributing to the closure of the settlement and a flurry of ameliorative legislation. This article also examines the limits of imperial legal reform in a distant colony. Remediation of the convict relocation system was impeded by bureaucratic intransigence and by the new emphasis on convict subordination in the aftermath of the 1819–21 Royal Commission of Inquiry into the state of the colony of New South Wales.

Island Despotism: Trinidad, the British Imperial Constitution and Global Legal Order

ABSTRACT Narratives of the history of international law in the early and middle decades of the nineteenth century have emphasised the role of global humanitarian movements in establishing international norms and institutions. The abolition of the slave trade and the amelioration of slavery feature prominently in this account as reform movements that supposedly laid the groundwork for human rights law. Using controversy about the constitution of the island of Trinidad and the excesses of its first governor, Thomas Picton, as a case study, we argue instead that attempts to reform slavery formed part of a wider British effort to construct a coherent imperial legal system, a project that corresponded to a different, and at the time more powerful vision of global order. As experiment and anti-model, Trinidad’s troubles provided critics with an advertisement for the necessity of robust imperial legal power in new and old colonies. Such a call for imperial oversight of colonial legal orders formed the basis of an empire-wide push to reorder the British world.

Ross v Chambers: Assimilation law and policy in the Northern Territory

On 9 September 1955, Jack Chambers, co-owner of Eva Downs Station in the Northern Territory, had an argument with his Aboriginal cook, Dolly Ross. That morning, Ross had refused to prepare breakfast for her fellow Aboriginal pastoral workers because she said she was ill. Chambers claimed that Dolly was malingering because she had quarrelled with her husband. After the argument, Dolly, her husband Jim and a minor named Munro left the station. Chambers claimed that he had ordered them off the property. The Ross family testified that they had left in protest when Chambers threatened to ‘liven up’ Dolly if she did not do her work. Later that morning, Jack Chambers, Colin Chambers, manager Jack Britt, and stockmen George Booth and Francis Booth rode out from the station either to muster cattle or to pursue the Ross family. Either motive was possible: there were cattle to be mustered and all hands were needed on deck.

Indigenous Crime and Settler Law: White Sovereignty after Empire.

Heather Douglas and Mark Finnane are two of the most careful observers of Aboriginal interfaces with criminal law and policing in Australia. Their collaboration was bound to be significant and Indigenous Crime and Settler Law does not disappoint. Together, they have produced a detailed and important analysis of exercises of criminal jurisdiction over violence among Aborigines in Australia from the arrival of the First Fleet until the present. Their point of departure is a paradox of sorts. In the 1830s, colonial courts asserted that Aboriginal law could not coexist with British law in Australia. From the moment of first settlement in 1788, they argued, British sovereignty made Aboriginal people subjects of the Crown and objects of criminal jurisdiction; whether committed in towns or on distant frontiers, their crimes against each other fell within the ambit of settler law. Yet, since the 1830s, Australian courts and police—for various and contradictory reasons— have acknowledged the persistence of Aboriginal law operating sometimes outside, sometimes alternative to, and sometimes within, Australian criminal law. Though most Aboriginal Australians are incarcerated for inter se violence, Douglas and Finnane tell us that jurisprudential assertions of sovereignty never articulated into the exercise of ‘perfect’ territorial jurisdiction. The real achievement of this book is its excavation of the complex and shifting logic underpinning this plural jurisdictional practice over time. Douglas and Finnane do this, not by surveying a few pronouncements on the subject by judges, protectors and bureaucrats, but through careful analysis of thousands of judgments and magistrates’ records. Here they find that the gap between sovereignty-claims and jurisdictional practices has had many causes since 1836. Key among them are, first, the fact that perfect territorial jurisdiction is, to this day, too costly to implement. Second, Aboriginal customary rules have proved to be extremely resilient—the ongoing product of fierce efforts to defend local cultures and values. Third, settler police and courts have always been beset by ambivalence about exercising jurisdiction over violence among Aborigines. This ambivalence has worn many guises since the early nineteenth century. It has stemmed from deep apathy and sometimes antipathy for Australian Aborigines; from long engagements among Aboriginal communities, local police and magistrates; from Christian efforts to gradually assimilate indigenous people; and, more recently, from the inflection of anthropology (warts and all) into governance, combined with a wavering political investment in reconciliation. Douglas and Finnane are too careful to celebrate insistent plurality. The book conveys the power indigenous communities have wielded, against all odds, on the legal imagination of their jailers, prosecutors, judges and juries. Yet, there are indigenous winners and losers in even the most open-hearted concessions to customary law. Douglas and Finnane reveal that, at key moments in the distant and proximate past, indigenous people themselves have sought the intervention of settler courts to solve community crises. They look unswervingly and dispassionately at some of the great injustices wrought by appeals to Aboriginal customary law—injustices bolstered by racist assumptions that Aboriginal women experience rape differently, or that gendered violence is the custom or the nature of Aboriginal men. Douglas and Finnane note, at the same time, that gendered violence has long been a trigger for (sometimes well-meant) settler colonial assaults on indigenous customary legal regimes. What is particularly admirable here is their insistence on complexity. This book is a model of scholarly empiricism, its

The Pig and the Peace: Transposing Order in Early Sydney

On October 29, 1795, the shooting of a pregnant pig caused a ruckus in Sydney. When Private William Faithful shot a “very fine sow,” her owner, John Boston, ran into the street “in a riotous manner” demanding to know “where is the damned Villain of a Rascal who has shot my Pig.”1 Either Quartermaster Thomas Laycock or Lieutenant Neil McKellar ordered private Faithful to defend the honor of the New South Wales Corps in manly fashion. In one version, Mr. Laycock is reported to have called, “do you hear, this man calls you a Rascal, do you take that—give him a damned good threshing.”2 Faithful dutifully beat Boston on the street in front of a crowd of soldiers and convicts. Faithful was not prosecuted for breaching public order, so Boston sued Faithful, Laycock, and bystander Private William Addy for trespass in assault and battery in the court of civil jurisdiction seeking £500 compensation.