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Sovereignty, International Law, and the Princely States of Colonial South Asia

Online ISBN:
9780191957451
Print ISBN:
9780192866585
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

Sovereignty, International Law, and the Princely States of Colonial South Asia

Priyasha Saksena
Priyasha Saksena
Lecturer in Law, University of Leeds
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Published online:
22 June 2023
Published in print:
6 June 2023
Online ISBN:
9780191957451
Print ISBN:
9780192866585
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

This book examines the relationship between colonialism and international law by focusing on debates surrounding the legal status of the ‘princely states’ of colonial South Asia. The princely states were ruled by indigenous rulers and were not considered to be British territory. Instead, they remained subject to British influence exercised through political officers, resulting in enduring controversies over whether they were ‘sovereign states’. This book traces how the language of sovereignty became the discourse for debating the legal status of the princely states and, in this way, mediated the exercise of political power in colonial South Asia. Focusing on the period between the mid-eighteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, it examines how international lawyers, British politicians, colonial officials, rulers and bureaucrats of princely states, and anticolonial nationalists continually redefined the concept of sovereignty. Assertions of sovereignty enabled these players to rely on the vocabulary of international law to resolve questions of legal status, the extent of rights, and the proper exercise of powers, and to construct a political order that was in line with their interests and aspirations. By invoking the vernacular of sovereignty in contrasting ways to support their differing visions of world order, these actors also attempted to reconfigure the boundaries among the spheres of the national, the imperial, and the international. Exploring the disputes and debates over the princely states is, therefore, key to understanding the history of sovereignty, the construction of the modern Indian nation-state, and the scope and stakes of international law itself.

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