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Law and the Economy in Colonial India . By Tirthankar Roy and Anand V. Swamy . Chicago : University of Chicago Press , 2016. xii + 240 pp. Maps, references, glossary, figures, tables, notes, index. Cloth, $45.00. ISBN 978-0-226-38764-2 .
Book Reviews
The legal system in India has been considered pathological for a long time (Oliver Mendelsohn, "The Pathology of the Indian Legal System," Modern Asian Studies [no. 4, 1981]). A person accused even of a minor crime can languish years in jail, without facing a proper trial and receiving judgment. A civil suit can take decades without a decree being passed in the case. In the period of British rule, a dispute concerning property sometimes took forty years in its progress through lower courts to High Courts in major cities like Calcutta, Bombay, or Madras to the Privy Council in London--the ultimate appellate tribunal. In the meantime, sons and grandsons might succeed fathers, grandfathers, or grandmothers, and the suit become an intergenerational legacy.
The pathology of this (ill-)legal system has continued in present-day India. One of the objectives of the monograph authored by Tirthankar Roy and Anand Swamy is to trace the colonial roots of this pathology. According to them, the ills of the system have two principal roots. The first is the need of the British to preserve a large part of the precolonial order to facilitate the initial process of the extraction of a surplus from the colony. The other is the need to adapt the system to the newly emerging demands of intercontinental trade, industry, and new forms of copyright such as in books or trademarks. In many of these areas, there were no codified laws or procedures in pre-British India. There was no law of contract, law of evidence, law regulating principal-agent relations outside the family or the clan, law to regulate partnerships between nonfamily partners, and laws relating to the newly emerging forms of joint-stock companies. Much of this absence was because business was carried on through informal agreements within networks of trust. Roy and Swamy also scrutinize the claim that it was the drive of modernizing legality that caused the complexity and find it wanting.
The book is an admirably concise account of the evolution of this highly...