Most Interesting 2020: Singh, Indian Princely States and the 19th-century Transformation of the Law of Nations

The thirteenth in our series "Most Interesting 2020":

Prabhakar Singh, Indian Princely States and the 19th-century Transformation of the Law of Nations (Journal of International Dispute Settlement, Vol. 11, no. 3, pp. 365–387, September 2020)

"Indian Princely States and the 19th-century Transformation of the Law of Nations" presents an interesting and never talked about account of the nineteenth century’s 600 Indian princely states in the transformation of "the law of nations" to the "international law." Engaging into the legal and political texts reflecting the semi-sovereign status of the Mughal and Maratha regimes, the claims in the study appears to have reversed the studies in the previous decades that have overlooked, under read and undervalued such bottom-up study in international legal history through native actors. It churns out some fascinating political and financial contributions of the "princely" states (as the "civilised" called it), in universalising the "European" law of nations. The transporting of civilizational values is vehemently refuted and the artificiality of the normative scarcity in the Indian subcontinent is highlighted.

The article scrapes off the layer that glossed the (European) international legal history and reveals a consciously glorified argument of European "law of nations" to have transformed into "universal" international law resting on the pillars of political and financial costs that the semi-sovereign states bore. An ingenious claim that is made through a novel style of reading international legal history through the "imperial jurisdiction," native litigations and petitions is an unsettling line of enquiry. The tightly placed arguments in a sharp tone is novel and seems to have taken Antony Anghie’s argument in Imperialism, Sovereignty, and the Making of International Law to one step ahead. The research, the style of writing and the thought provoking arguments are sure to make the reader see the imprudence of the previous Eurocentric scholarship.

Swati Singh Parmar
Assistant Professor
Dharmashastra National Law University, Jabalpur