The Crown stands at the heart of the New Zealand, British, Australian and Canadian constitutions as the ultimate source of legal authority and embodiment of state power. A familiar icon of the Westminster model of government, it is also an enigma. Even constitutional experts struggle to define its attributes and boundaries: who or what is the Crown and how is it embodied? Is it the Queen, the state, the government, a corporation sole or aggregate, a relic of feudal England, a metaphor, or a mask for the operation of executive power? How are its powers exercised? How have the Crowns of different Commonwealth countries developed? The Shapeshifting Crown combines legal and anthropological perspectives to provide novel insights into the Crown's changing nature and its multiple, ambiguous and contradictory meanings. It sheds new light onto the development of the state in postcolonial societies and constitutional monarchy as a cultural system.

The Crown is the bedrock of Westminster-style democracies, yet its meanings, powers and effects are opaque and little understood.

In 1888, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council ruled in St. Catherine’s Milling and Lumber Company v. The Queen, a case involving the Saulteaux people’s land rights in Ontario. This precedent-setting case would define the legal contours of Aboriginal title in Canada for almost a hundred years, despite the racist assumptions about Indigenous peoples at the heart of the case. In Flawed Precedent, preeminent legal scholar Kent McNeil provides a compelling account of this contentious case. He begins by delving into the historical and ideological context of the 1880s. He then examines the trial in detail, demonstrating how prejudicial attitudes towards Indigenous peoples influenced the decision. He further discusses the effects that St. Catherine’s had on law and policy until the 1970s when its authority was finally questioned in Calder, then in Delgamuukw, Marshall/Bernard, Tsilhqot’in, and other key rulings. He also provides an informative analysis of the current judicial understanding of Aboriginal title in Canada, now driven by evidence of Indigenous law and land use rather than by the discarded prejudicial assumptions of a bygone era.

At last a history that explains how indigenous dispossession and survival underlay and shaped the birth of Australian democracy. The legacy of seizing a continent and alternately destroying and governing its original people shaped how white Australians came to see themselves as independent citizens. It also shows how shifting wider imperial and colonial politics influenced the treatment of indigenous Australians, and how indigenous people began to engage in their own ways with these new political institutions. It is, essentially, a bringing together of two histories that have hitherto been told separately: one concerns the arrival of early democracy in the Australian colonies, as white settlers moved from the shame and restrictions of the penal era to a new and freer society with their own institutions of government; the other is the tragedy of indigenous dispossession and displacement, with its frontier violence, poverty, disease and enforced regimes of mission life.

This book examines New Zealand's constitution, through the lens of constitutional realism. It looks at the practices, habits, conventions and norms of constitutional life. It focuses on the structures, processes and culture that govern the exercise of public power – a perspective that is necessary to explore and account for a lived, rather than textual, constitution. New Zealand's constitution is unique. One of three remaining unwritten democratic constitutions in the world, it is characterised by a charming set of anachronistic contrasts. “Unwritten”, but much found in various written sources. Built on a network of Westminster constitutional conventions but generously tailored to local conditions. Proudly independent, yet perhaps a purer Westminster model than its British parent. Flexible and vulnerable, while oddly enduring. It looks to the centralised authority that comes with a strong executive, strict parliamentary sovereignty, and a unitary state. However, its populace insists on egalitarian values and representative democracy, with elections fiercely conducted nowadays under a system of proportional representation. The interests of indigenous Maori are protected largely through democratic majority rule. A reputation for upholding the rule of law, yet few institutional safeguards to ensure compliance.

In recent decades, the global wealth of the rich has soared to leave huge chasms of wealth inequality. This book argues that we cannot talk about inequalities in Britain today without talking about the monarchy. Running the Family Firm explores the postwar British monarchy in order to understand its economic, political, social and cultural functions. Although the monarchy is usually positioned as a backward-looking, archaic institution and an irrelevant anachronism to corporate forms of wealth and power, the relationship between monarchy and capitalism is as old as capitalism itself. This book frames the monarchy as the gold standard corporation: The Firm. Using a set of case studies – the Queen, Prince Charles, Prince Harry, Kate Middleton and Meghan Markle – it contends that The Firm’s power is disguised through careful stage management of media representations of the royal family. In so doing, it extends conventional understandings of what monarchy is and why it matters.

This book addresses the history, current development and future of indigenous self-governance in five settler- colonial nations: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa and the United States.

This book analyses the unique constitutional system in operation in Thailand as a continuous process of bricolage between various Western constitutional models and Buddhist doctrines of Kingship. Reflecting on the category of 'constitutional monarchy' and its relationship with notions of the rule of law, it investigates the hybridised semi-authoritarian, semi-liberal monarchy that exists in Thailand. By studying constitutional texts and political practices in light of local legal doctrine, the book shows that the monarch's affirmation of extraordinary prerogative powers strongly rests on wider doctrinal claims about constitutionalism and the rule of law. This finding challenges commonly accepted assertions about Thailand, arguing that the King's political role is not the remnant of the 'unfinished' borrowing of Western constitutionalism, general disregard for the law, or cultural preference for 'charismatic authority', as generally thought. Drawing on materials and sources not previously available in English, this important work provides a comprehensive and critical account of the Thai 'mixed constitutional monarchy' from the late 19th century to the present day.

Twelve authorities on the constitutional monarchy in Canada discuss how this historic institution, inherited from the United Kingdom and shared with fourteen other countries, will change after the long reign of Queen Elizabeth II comes to a close.

The Red River Colony was the Hudson’s Bay Company’s first planned settlement. As a settler-colonial project par excellence, it was designed to undercut Indigenous peoples’ “troublesome” autonomy and curtain the company’s dependency on their labour. In this critical re-evaluation of the history of the Red River Colony, Susan Dianne Brophy upends standard accounts by foregrounding Indigenous producers as a driving force of change. A Legacy of Exploitation challenges the enduring yet misleading fantasy of Canada as a glorious nation of adventurers, showing how autonomy can become distorted as complicity in processes of dispossession.