This book examines the politics and culture of eastern India's landed chiefs.

This book, strongly grounded in primary sources, makes an important contribution to the intellectual history of early modern Bengal. It brings to light the complex interpenetration of diverse interests, opinions, and ideologies articulated by various social groups implicated in the process of colonization on the lines of Ranajit Guha's work on property relations in Bengal and Radhika Singha's work on law. There is no comparable work specifically on the subject of Hindu property rights and how these came to be perceived or interpreted in early modern Bengal. The author explores the so-called compendia prepared under British auspices and argues that there was hardly any link between the Smritis and the laws. The latter were determined almost entirely by changing British policy with regard to land revenue and that many of the positive features of Hindu custom like women's rights to property were undermined in the process.

In This Book A Well-Known Historian Offers A Critical Study Of A New Aspect Of Modern Indian History: The Gradual Introduction Of English Law Into India From The Advent Of The East India Company Till The Culmination Of The Period Of Codification In The Closing Years Of The Nineteenth Century. Special Stress Has Been Laid On The Impact Of English Law On Administration, Economy, Society And Constitutional Development. New Light Has Been Thrown Not Only On The Development Of Legal, Judicial And Constitutional Systems But Also On The Complex Historical Process Of The Emergence Of Modern India.

This book is a major contribution to our understanding of the role played by law(s) in the British Empire. Using a variety of interdisciplinary approaches, the authors provide in-depth analyses which shine new light on the role of law in creating the people and places of the British Empire. Ranging from the United States, through Calcutta, across Australasia to the Gold Coast, these essays seek to investigate law’s central place in the British Empire, and the role of its agents in embedding British rule and culture in colonial territories. One of the first collections to provide a sustained engagement with the legal histories of the British Empire, in particular beyond the settler colonies, this work aims to encourage further scholarship and new approaches to the writing of the histories of that Empire. Legal Histories of the British Empire: Laws, Engagements and Legacies will be of value not only to legal scholars and graduate students, but of interest to all of those who want to know more about the laws in and of the British Empire.