There is a new availability cascade among 'scholars' suggesting that ' When the EIC’s charter was renewed in 1834, (Parliament) subjugated the King's Court to the Company by vesting in the governor general in Calcutta an all-India legislative power as the head of a legislative council. This meant that the British parliament exempted the colonial government in India from the rule of law.' I need hardly say this is nonsense. The Crown in Parliament is sovereign. The House of Lords was the final court of appeal though its members might also sit in the Privy Council. The claim by Courts in India to an authority superior to the Governor General, had never been admitted or given effect. Alongside various judicial reforms in England and Wales, the position of the EIC as having delegated power from the Crown in Parliament, was clarified. This did not mean India had become a 'despotism'. It merely meant that a type of nuisance law-suit was curbed.
The author of the ludicrous assertion given above is Japanese- one Haruki Inagaki. The question arises whether an Indian scholar can say something yet more stupid and ignorant?
Thankfully, the answer is yes. Scroll.in has an excerpt from one such historian, Rahul Govind, who has written a book titled-
‘The King’s Plunder, The King’s Bodies: Prize Laws, the British Empire and the Modern Legal Order,’
I need hardly say that the 'modern legal order' has nothing at all to do with plunder or prize money or, indeed, Empires of any sort.
Still, Rahul- a Marxist- wants to pretend that British in India were constantly raping and looting the natives. True, in 1947, brown Babus took over from White Sahibs but the rape and looting continues. Just look at Rahul Gandhi! Modi has clearly been buggering him senseless. Also, you may remember, Modi took away his house and rendered him a homeless 'yatri' wandering hither and thither. True, some nice Judge restored Gandhi's bungalow to him but was it not for the fell purpose of sodomizing him the more incessantly? Unless we understand that what Kali Marks said in the Grundrisse is 'Modi is fucking you in the ass! Nirmala is stealing all your money!' we will not be able to grasp the catachresis of the Post-Kristevan Chora as the sodomized subaltern of Singur under conditions of Neo-Liberalism and Marcusian repressive desublimation within the modalities of the structures and ligatures of Modi fucking everybody in the ass.
The book establishes that the East India Company’s conquests in the subcontinent can only be comprehended in terms of long-standing royal authority in relationship to the Company – more precisely through royally sanctioned Prize charters.
This is nonsense. Conquests can only be comprehended in military terms. The Law doesn't matter. No doubt, at an earlier period in history, incentives for soldiers and sailors were linked to prize money and war booty but this was not a prominent feature of the rule of John Company.
Prize laws [royal charters or legal rules established by courts or statutes confirming the original royal rights and subsequent rights by armed personnel over the acquisition and distribution of property plundered in hostilities and war] formed an aspect of the King’s rights of conquest, historically traced in Part I, though statutes emerged on the matter from the very end of the seventeenth century, particularly in the contexts of war.
This is misleading. Western European Kings sometimes asserted a right to a portion of naval prizes or other spoils of war. But in seventeenth and eighteenth century, there was a mobile market for mercenaries and so Courts tended to endorse what was customary or 'the going rate'. This was an economic, not a legal matter.
Part II establishes the fact that royally sanctioned Prize charters form a crucial aspect of the constitutional and jurisprudential bases of the English East India Company’s fabled conquests of the Indian subcontinent from the middle of the eighteenth century onwards.
Conquest has no 'constitutional' o 'jurisprudential' basis. It is a matter of military force. Speaking generally, the custom was that six months 'batta' was paid to victorious soldiers unless their share of the booty would be greater in which case they might repay the batta and keep the larger sum. But this was very much a matter of prevailing custom or a sort of collective bargaining. The East India Company was a trading concern which diversified into tax farming. It was a 'Stationary Bandit' which is why many preferred it to the Maratha 'Chauth' or the periodic depredations of the Pindari. The reason Indians preferred British rule was because Princes weren't constantly going to war in the hope of robbing each other.
More specifically, the royal letters-patent granted to the Company at their request in 1756–57 enabled the Company not merely to appropriate prize and plunder, but simultaneously both treaty with as well as conquer native polities.
They could do that anyway. The purpose of the letters-patent was to capitalize future income streams thus making it easier to raise money.
These letters-patent were part of a specific channel of jurisdiction
No. Letters-patent create a right within a specific jurisdiction.
whose source was royal authority, notwithstanding the existence of statutes on the subject.
Statutes have the authority of the Crown in Parliament.
In this context, it is important to note, as is discussed in Part II, that when the East India Company applied to be given the rights to prize under an existing statute, they were advised to directly apply to get such a grant from the King.
A mere formality. At the time, King's Equity was administered separately.
Therefore the letter-patent of 1757-58 granting rights to prize, war and treaty was of enormous importance to the rights of the East India Company,
It made no difference whatsoever. Winning wars mattered and raising money mattered. The law didn't matter.
emerging as they did from royal authority, not parliamentary statute.
But Parliament could impeach those who used royal authority improperly.
The Prize cases of the 18th century and even the 19th century therefore were adjudicated by royal channels reaching up to the privy council, not parliament.
The Privy Council of Great Britain had been superseded by the Cabinet. George III would assert himself a little at a later period but, at the time of Plassey, the Cabinet was what mattered.
On the other hand, the Company’s very corporate identity, apart from specific powers of governance and adjudication, depended on forms of royal jurisdiction notwithstanding the existence of statutes to legitimate them broadly.
This was true of any Corporation. But all could be bent out of shape by the Crown in Parliament.
If war-booty provides a clue to the constitution of international relations,
It doesn't.
this will only strike the practitioners of international law today as odd or embarrassing.
They will think you have shit for brains, mate.
Eminent jurists of the 19th century were well aware of the originary function of Prize jurisdiction, focused on the seas, maritime commerce as much as war. Little more than the fact that the so-called founder of international law, Hugo Grotius, had cut his teeth in crafting a mammoth work of advocacy, Commentary on the Laws of Prize and Booty, to the cause of plunder, is necessary to whet the appetite. Such was the jurisprudential matrix of an evolving “common” – civil but not always to – law between European empires, whether monarchical or republican.
Rubbish! Treaty law or prevailing customary practice decided matters. Nobody was quoting Grotius.
Here germinated the precise procedures and principles involved in the rights to appropriate the properties of enemies and neutrals during conditions of war and hostility.
No. Those rights pre-existed. Monarchs would take a share in return for enabling capitalization and increasing fungibility of shares in future revenue streams from such activities. But unlike the Joint Stock Pirates of the seventeenth century, John Company was a trading venture which diversified into tax farming.
It is through war and its principles – seen as constitutive of sovereign activity – as much as its effects on populations and countries, that the present thesis argues for the construction of the sovereign state as much as the global order therein spawned.
Bullshit! Sovereigns pre-existed. The Civil Law is Roman Law. Dukes and Counts were Roman officials. The Church was happy to anoint Kings and Emperors, for a price. Thus Civil Law, Canon Law and Treaty Law of various sorts 'spawned the order which Wester Europe made 'global' by crossing oceans.
Prize jurisdiction certainly had an ancient history going back to Greek and Roman writers, as much as Biblical scripture, which the seventeenth-century writers were well aware of and scrupulously built upon.
Nobody gave a shit about 'seventeenth century writers'. Custom prevailed.
From this early modern period, it was largely an affair of the seas, jurisprudentially and militarily nourishing the growing commercial trades across the oceans of the globe.
Oceanic trade is indeed an 'affair of the seas'. What a wonderful discovery!
Such a history of Prize will turn out to be
utter shit. This nutter is fucked in the head.
a double of a history of trade and commerce,
trade is commerce you fucking cretin!
that “cunning civility” of Europe.
This nutter means 'sly civility' which is shit Homo Baba pulled out of his Parsi arse.
Modern international conventions regarding the rules of warfare, commerce, neutrality and nationality, it will be argued, cannot be grasped outside their historical and institutional emergence from the framework of royal authority, military warfare and Prize jurisdiction.
This cretin can't grasp shit. To understand international law means to know how it has been applied and to be able to predict verdicts that will be given by international courts and tribunals. This does not involve having any knowledge whatsoever of laws or customs which preceded the signing of relevant international treaties.
If citizenship is what defines political identity in terms of rights and obligations as norms today in democratic nation-states,
Citizenship does not define 'political identity' or rights and obligations. It defines nationality. One may be a citizen of X and yet have a political identity as a partisan of Y. One may have no rights whatsoever and may be awaiting execution without ceasing to be a citizen.
allegiance would have to be considered the equivalent of this concept for the period between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries.
What this cretin is getting at is the rule in Calvin's case. A boy born in Scotland could hold land in England because he had personal allegiance to King James who was monarch of both realms. However the doctrine of the indelibility of allegiance- 'nemo potest exuere patriam'- though established law in the UK till 1870, was bitterly contested. In practice, if the liege lord could not enforce allegiance, it did not exist. However, as Blackstone clarifies, allegiance arises from subject-hood. If you are born a subject, you remain a subject. On the other hand, a sovereign could swear allegiance to a particular monarch for a particular purpose- e.g. to give aid in war and to hold estates in that monarch's realm- without ceasing to be a sovereign when on other territory.
Allegiance to the natural person of the King (and heirs) in a spatial order of diverse and diversifying jurisdiction, as much as temporally changing authorities, was unmistakable, and constitutionally as much as jurisprudentially enshrined [in the British empire].
No. Allegiance was a justiciable matter precisely because it was defeasible.
What is called the Anglo-Maratha wars gave rise to two interlocking judicial cases on prizes, which form the subject of this section. The first case studied here was known as the Deccan Prize Money case, and was much celebrated in its time. The issue to be decided was, who precisely was entitled to prize money: the actual captors directly involved in the war, or even those military divisions who played a more indirect role in victory?
This was a purely internal matter for the military establishment. Unlike the Moro Raghunath habeas corpus writ of 1828 which the Government refused to enforce and which led to conflict with the Court, the Prize money case had no constitutional significance.
Implicitly, this legal dispute also sheds light on the responsibility, if any, of the victors towards the vanquished,
Don't be silly!
and therein the rules of engagement between parties during a war and thereafter.
It was quite usual for journalists and some Radical MPs to describe in lurid terms horrible atrocities committed by John Company on innocent natives. Nobody cared.
The second case involved an issue that emerged directly from one of the battles within the Anglo-Maratha wars, i.e. the capture and conquest of Pune.
The treasurer of the Peshwa, 'Narrabo Govend Outia' claimed that he owned money confiscated from him because it actually belonged to the Peshwa- a defeated sovereign. Outia or his agents spent a lot of money in Court cases trying to get compensation. The Privy Council rejected his claim. The claim of the judiciary in India to be independent had to be rejected otherwise it would seek to get paid by the Indian Princes so as to frustrate the machinery of Government. Naturally, the judiciary lost this battle because it was parasitic and its actions would have been destructive of British power in India.
Here the issue to be decided was the exact limits of the rights to acquire the prize. More specifically, since the prize was linked to war, the question to be decided concerned the moment when the right to take the prize was to have ceased, which in turn involved the question of how one was to discern the end of war.
Fuck off! The dude was beaten and kept in custody and his money was taken from him. His agent or executor thought he could pay lawyers to get some of that cash back but though the lawyers took his money happily enough, they couldn't do shit for him.
[In the second case] Ammerchund, executor of Narrabo Outia, against the United Company and the Company officers Elphinstone and Robertson in the Supreme Court of Bombay, a case that was later heard on appeal by the King in Council (privy council). The Supreme Court of Bombay heard the case for 22 days, examining witnesses and evidence from both sides. From this, the following facts were inferred by the court. On 17 July 1818, Lieutenant Robertson got his men to bring Narrabo Outia from his home in Pune, and had his men search Outia’s house. Robertson had been appointed provisional Collector and Magistrate of Pune and the adjacent country in February 1817, a position that was delegated to him by Elphinstone who was himself appointed as Commissioner in December 1817 in the aftermath of the conquest of Pune which had just taken place in November 1817. Narrabo Outia was an important official in the Peshwa administration and held the position of treasurer. Robertson was in charge of civil and criminal matters, and his men confiscated 28 bags of gold mohurs and venetians (forms of currency) which were found in Outia’s house. While Outia was detained under duress, along with his gomastha, Robertson claimed that the money found in the house was the Peshwa’s money. Outia and his gomashta were released only after close to four months, at the end of which the venetians were given to Robertson. While they were being detained, Robertson was approached by the prize agent about the money that he had found in Outia’s house.
Robertson in his response appeared to be uncertain as to whether the confiscated money could be characterised as a prize or not. While Outia, under detention, had written in his own hand that the money was the Peshwa’s, the judges of the Supreme Court did not consider this statement as having any value, since they inferred from the facts of the case that it was extracted under conditions of duress.
The properties seized from Outia were to be characterised as prizes, according to the defendants, because this was the same money that Outia had brought with him to his house in Pune from the fort of Rygheur where he had surrendered to the Company’s forces. Thus, the defendants claimed, Outia, on surrender, had broken the terms of the capitulation and the treaty then entered into by fleeing the fortress and reaching Pune with the money of the Peshwa. That it was the Peshwa’s money meant that it could be treated as the enemy’s property and prize money; as the proceeds of war, it was a rightful and lawful acquisition. In one sense, the defendants argued, that since the state of war did not end by July 1818 even though the Peshwa had surrendered in June, the seizure from Outia’s house constituted an act undertaken in the course of war. This argument was justified because notwithstanding the surrender at Pune by the Peshwa, hostilities still existed in the countryside, and Outia’s money, seized in Pune, was to be understood as enemy property.
These assets included treasure (gold coins, jewels, shawls and property) from the fort of Rygheur which had been taken by Colonel Prother after the capture of the fort; the treasure confiscated in Pune had five bags of venetians which were subsequently taken by Robertson. In the course of the proceedings, the claims regarding the assets confiscated at Rygheur were given up. The value of the entire confiscated properties calculated with interest amounted to 36,56,00,07 rupees. In response, the Company as well as Elphinstone and Robertson argued on the principle that the properties seized were lawful prizes by right of war and conquest. This was an issue as matters of war and prize directly concerned His Majesty, and the Supreme Court of Bombay had no proper jurisdiction over these.
[On appeal, in of the Privy Council] In the final judgment Lord Tenterdon, the judge, agreed with the solicitor general. He stated that “hostile seizure” was made, “if not flagrante” then “nondumcessanto bello” with regard to time, place and person.
No. Tenterdon said it happened at a time when though the war was not raging, yet it had not yet ceased- non flagrante sed nondum cessanto bello
This meant that the municipal court had no jurisdiction and its decision was therefore overturned, and any appeal only lay with the government. While this was the decision of Lord Tenterdon, in the course of the arguments he made another fundamental point that is germane to the set of issues being discussed. The lawyers of Outia argued that the property entrusted to Outia was the private property of the Peshwa and therefore not subject to seizure as a prize, the war having come to a close a while ago.
Hostilities had not ceased.
In response, Tenterdon stated as a matter of fact that in the case of an “absolute sovereign”, one could not make a distinction between private and public property. While public property meant the property of the state, “in the property of the absolute sovereign, who may dispose of everything at any time, and in any way he pleases, is there any distinction”. This implies that not only is the private property of the absolute sovereign “public”, but also that which is public or any individual’s (private) property can also be termed as in fact his own (public) property. It would thus render all property that exists under the absolutist sovereign public property in fact and therefore prize.
This is nonsense. No one doubted that a sovereign, absolute or otherwise had personal property- e.g. his clothes, his bed, his dog- which he should be allowed to keep. Equally, a sovereign who entrusts money to his treasurer- as opposed to a banker in some different territory- is clearly using public funds.
On the other hand, accepting the “fact” of war without providing any sign that might indicate its cessation or peace, the territories of India are once again defined as a state of war.
Nonsense! The plain fact is there were ongoing hostilities in the Bombay Presidency but not in the Calcutta Presidency.
Hence the question as to whether a (military) officer could at any time seize anyone’s property would have to be answered in the affirmative.
This is simply false. Govind is lying. His book is a pile of shit. No doubt, this is because King Charles III sent Rishi Sunak to crack open Govind's skull and plunder his brain.
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