Preliminary Programme

In the months after the defeat of the 1885 North-West Rebellion, Stipendiary Magistrate Charles Rouleau tried three Cree men, Charles Ducharme, Dressy Man and Bright Eyes, for murder in Battleford, a small town on the banks of the North Saskatchewan River in the flat, empty Canadian prairies. The facts of the case were undisputed. On the day of her death the victim, She Wins, was carried to the site of her execution wrapped in an animal skin. She was too old and frail to walk. Surrounded by dozens of onlookers, both Cree and European, Ducharme raised a stick and struck her, hard, on the side of the head. She fell to the ground. Bright Eyes then raised his pistol and shot her, the gun so close that the powder scorched her bloodied hair. Then Dressy Man approached and buried his axe in her neck, and the blood flowed onto the earth. At trial, the prisoners did not call anyone to speak in their defence.
A jury of six white men convicted Charles Ducharme and Dressy Man of murder and sentenced them to death. Bright Eyes was found guilty of manslaughter. Three days later, the judge, Charles Rouleau, forwarded his papers from the case to Ottawa. He included a note in which he wrote that he disagreed with the jury’s decision to convict Ducharme and Dressy Man of murder. The defendants, he argued, had lacked the malice necessary to justify a guilty verdict. He explained to the colonial government in Ottawa that the Cree believed that She Wins was a cannibal monster called a wendigo, and that executing her had been an act of bravery on the part of her killers. In this paper, I use the death of She Wins and the controversy that followed to explore how imperial authorities struggled to apply common law jurisprudence to indigenous populations during a period of territorial expansion and legal consolidation. I argue that debates about criminal responsibility revealed the cracks in the colonial government’s veneer of self-confident universalism. (Show less)

This paper explores the tensions between ‘madness’, ‘badness’ and ‘African-ness’ in colonial murder trials. Its evidential base is over 2500 murder trial transcripts from Kenya, Malawi/Nyasaland and the Gold Coast, alongside legal department files and psychiatric evaluations. The paper uses murder trials to analyse the relationship between justice, colonial citizen/subjects and constructions of African mentalities. It looks at three key flashpoints of debates on criminal responsibility that ranged across these colonies: over mercy and cultural defence narratives; the boundaries of insanity and ‘African’ psychologies, and witchcraft. Firstly, whilst violence was endemic to colonial rule rates of capital punishment were, surprisingly, often lower than in England. This was because colonial legal discourses reflected a more conflicted view of the African murderer than simple ‘repugnance’ against African savagery, being strongly informed by the contradictory nature of colonial governance and its ideological landscapes. Legal records reveal that it was common for murderers to be viewed as acting from their ‘African’ natures rather than any inherent criminality, with Africans held to lack the self-control and discipline of the ‘civilised European’. But whilst such tropes normatively reinforced racialized domination, this paper uses trial transcripts to show how, in court, they became key to successful cultural defence narratives which argued that precisely because Africans were ‘primitives’ and ‘savages’ they could not be judged by the norms of ‘civilised’ white men or held to the same standards of accountability, and therefore deserved mercy. The paper will also explore how in the inter-war years this pragmatic, local, ‘administrative justice’ increasingly clashed with the universalistic, common law-based ‘due process’ espoused by London as necessary for upholding imperial authority and protecting native peoples. Secondly, this tension between universalism and particularism mirrored clashes within colonies between legal and medical officers over criminal insanity. This paper will use debates over applying the M’Naghten rules and what constituted ‘madness’ in murder trials to highlight the incomplete medicalization of criminal insanity in Africa, and the pathologization of African life. Finally, the paper addresses perhaps the most contentious issue of criminal responsibility: witchcraft. With killings of suspected witches often condoned by the defendant’s community, the problem for the courts was not only how to determine between the genuinely ‘mad’, the ‘bad’, and those who truly believed themselves bewitched, but how to treat the latter with respect for both ‘native custom’ and colonial order, highlighting the gaps between colonial and local conceptions of justice and morality. Overall, this paper will add a comparative African dimension to this panel’s discussion of how law and colonial courts constructed their criminal subjects. (Show less)

Police officers found San Dwe behind the tapir house just after midnight on August 25, 1928. When they discovered him, he was dressed only in a pyjama top and his underpants. He was in visible distress and incoherent -- or, at least, the policemen struggled to understand him. English was his second language, and it was reportedly ‘broken’ in the best of circumstances. San Dwe was one of the zoo’s elephant-drivers, a young Karen man of twenty-two years, who had moved to London from Burma less than three years earlier. He told them that he had injured his foot after falling from the window of the room, located immediately above the tapir house, in which he lived. He also told them that his room-mate, the famous and celebrated mahout, Said Ali, had been attacked by a group of white men and was ‘finished’. On investigating, the officers found that the door to the room had been forced open, and in it they discovered Ali’s body. He had been violently murdered in his bed. It appeared that he had died from repeated blows from a sledge hammer and a pickaxe, both of which had been left at the scene. San Dwe was taken by the police for medical observations. One officer recalled in his deposition that San Dwe was ‘foaming at the mouth’, although the doctor at the mental hospital dismissed this claim. She said he was but a frightened young man. Soon after his observations San Dwe was arrested and charged with Said Ali's murder.

This paper used this tragic murder to explore changing conceptions of race, masculinity and justice in Britain and Burma during the inter-war years. Whilst unpicking these wider aspects of the case, it keeps San Dwe at its heart, enabling us to see how he attempted to locate himself and establish his subject-hood within British imperial and Karen nationalist discourses. (Show less)

The earliest genocide known so far took place in Southern India about 29,000 years ago. A group of men arriving from the North hit upon the population living there. The invaders killed all native males and took their womenfolk as the spoils. We know that this massacre happened and when it took place because we can deduce this from a statistical examination of DNA in present-day populations. There is a growing literature that reconstructs the earliest history of modern humans from our genetic inheritance. Examining this literature with a fresh eye, I contend that it fails to take adequate account of the likelihood of inter-group violence (and possibly even intra-group). The example just given is the proverbial exception that proves the rule. I focus on one case in particular, which I claim as my original contribution: violence in the making of "race" (in particular groups with different skin pigmentation). Studies abound of violence triggered by racial divisions, but I am considering the reverse: violence causing racial divisions. I posit that race formation went together with processes of exclusion, expulsion and aggression. More precisely, depigmentation in Western and Eastern Eurasia was not merely a process of natural selection; it involved the rise of an established-outsiders conflict as a result of which white people claimed the most favorable regions for themselves. Thus, my contribution primarily contains a hypothesis, which I will have to make as plausible as possible. (Show less)

By the early years of the nineteenth century, the East India Company’s aggressive military campaigning had secured it a more definitive political space in India. The driving forces of the Company at that time were clear: military and revenue. It is no coincidence then, that the early nineteenth century saw a series of social regulations enacted by the colonial state in India that were aimed at further ensuring the security of both. Debates among military officials resulted in regulations to better manage military spaces. At the same time, revenue officials targeted the ways in which alcohol production and sales were taxed. Accordingly, a series of military and civil laws emerged, both of which ultimately sought to manage alcohol consumption – by European troops stationed across India and by what the state deemed ‘low class’ Indians. Both groups had the potential to disrupt the upward rise of the Company. Drunken, disorderly soldiers posed a problem of discipline and military control, whereas Indians posed a two-fold problem. Tax evasion by toddy tappers cut off valuable revenue streams for the state and intoxicated Indian labourers posed similar discipline and manpower problems as their European soldier-peers. With the issue of liquor, there was considerable overlap between military and revenue concerns. Officers commanding European troops lamented the ease with which they secured illicit liquor and Revenue collectors in numerous Company territories complained about the ways in which taxes on toddy and other spirits were so easily and frequently evaded by Indian producers and consumers.

This paper looks at law as a tool for managing social relations and economic life in nineteenth century India. It explores the path that the colonial state sought to tread between arguing for a ‘moral uplift’ of drinking populations and securing revenue in drafting and enforcing liquor laws. The laws themselves were often race- (and class-) specific. As such, they shed light on how the colonial state understood both its subjects and servants. It examines the relationship between the state and those most affected by the regulations on liquor: liquor producers and sellers on the one hand, and its consumers, European and Indian on the other. (Show less)