Empires of Vice: For Those Interested in the State

This is the fourth in a series of posts about my book, Empires of Vice. 

In an earlier post, I mentioned that a key argument in Empires of Vice is that the rise of opium prohibition across Southeast Asia under European rule was shaped by local administrators who constructed official problems. In this post, I seek to elaborate on what I mean by constructing official problems; and why it matters for those interested in theories of state building and symbolic bureaucratic power.

Contrary to presumptions that opium was an “easy” fiscal base for revenue-hungry 19^th and 20th century colonial states, my book stresses how difficult it was for the British and French alike to sustain states built on opium revenue collected from excise taxes, largely due to the ambiguity of vice as a regulatory category.

Think of a sort of original sin. During initial moments of territorial conquest in Southeast Asia, European powers began using taxation to regulate opium consumption as a peculiar vice among the colonized, but without clear conceptions about what exactly defined a colonial vice, why it was a fiscal object, let alone what justified the involvement of a foreign state. Yet, administrators on the ground began collecting revenue, regulating people’s behavior, and announcing the legitimacy of the state’s actions. If states usually puzzle before they power—first figuring out who and what they govern; and then trying to mold society into their interpreted reality— the reverse happened for colonial states built on opium. They powered before puzzling. This sort of overreach—of felt sentiments over careful knowledge—became an enduring source of tension that subsequent administrators would struggle to manage.

At first, there were minor issues, annoyances of bureaucratic tasks that came with paperwork, with poor labels or classification templates that didn’t fit reality, counting errors, adjusting policies at the margins and dealing with small unintended consequences. For instance, the British in Burma used a template borrowed from Bengal that used religion to categorize opium consumers, which placed 90% of the population, the Buddhist majority, in a single box, until excise administrators adjusted the uninformative template to separately label Burmese, Chinese, Indian and others. Such was the stuff of everyday opium administration, which accumulated and had large effects over time. Administrators came to see some issues as more troubling than others, and gave official reality to perceived problems through their record keeping. Deep in the underbelly of bureaucracies, a recursive process of defining and solving problems repeated and escalated slowly into shared understandings of large threats relating to opium that were politically actionable. The construction of official problems as such, generated the conditions of possibility for anti-opium reforms, by internally eroding the confidence of those most intimately involved in running the state.

What do such inner workings of Southeast Asia’s opium-entangled colonial states reveal more generally? First, looking beyond the modern state's classic Weberian guise, social scientists are able to see it as a problem-defining and solving entity. We become more attune to when and how states are riddled by inner anxieties, rather than presume the constant hubris and arrogance of monopolizing power. Second, as Charles Tilly famously argued, states often resemble protection rackets, namely, a scheme to produce both danger and at a price, the shield against it. Empires of Vice identifies an administrative mechanism—the construction of official problems—through which states arrogate authority to themselves by defining dangers and threats that justify protection.

In my next post, I’ll share my experience speaking about these aspects of my book’s argument through a transcribed interview with the Asia Experts Forum and a podcast with the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

-Diana Kim

Katz on the Campaign for Woman Officeholding in Ohio

Elizabeth D. Katz, Washington University in St. Louis School of Law, has posted "A Woman Stumps Her State": Nellie G. Robinson and Women's Right to Hold Public Office in Ohio, which appeared in a symposium issue on the Nineteenth Amendment in the Akron Law Review:

In recognition of the centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment, this essay provides an introduction to a largely overlooked yet essential component of the women’s movement: the pursuit of women’s legal right to hold public office. From the mid-nineteenth century through ratification of the federal suffrage amendment in 1920, women demanded access to appointed and elected positions, ranging from notary public to mayor. Because the legal right to hold office had literal and symbolic connections to the right to vote, suffragists and antisuffragists were deeply invested in the outcome. Courts and legislatures varied in their responses, with those in the Midwest and West generally more willing than those in the Northeast and South to construe or create law permitting women to hold office. This account centers on the experiences of Nellie G. Robinson, a pioneering woman lawyer whose efforts to secure public office in Ohio received nationwide attention in the years surrounding the turn of the twentieth century. To contextualize Robinson’s successes and failures, the essay expands to consider the parallel efforts of other women lawyers from the period, as well as the broader history of women’s officeholding in Ohio—a state with laws and politics reflecting the major trends and tensions in the national women’s officeholding movement.

This essay was written for a symposium issue of the Akron Law Review, organized with the Center for Constitutional Law. The topic for the conference and symposium was "The 19th Amendment at 100: From the Vote to Gender Equality."

--Dan Ernst

Schiller on Milov, "The Cigarette"

The latest post in JOTWELL's Legal History Section comes from Reuel Schiller (UC Hastings Law), who has written an admiring review of Sarah Milov's The Cigarette: A Political History (Harvard University Press, 2019). Here's an excerpt from the review:

Until the early 1980s, my high school had a smoking lounge. It was a medium-sized room off the lobby with some beat-up furniture where students could hang out, smoking their Marlboros and their clove cigarettes. There was even a king and queen of the smoking lounge, pictured in the yearbook alongside the prom’s royal court.

Today such an accommodation of smoking is unimaginable. Indeed, in most states, it would be illegal. In the past forty years, the United States transformed from a society where the cigarette represented a combination of sophistication and rebellion to one in which smokers are benighted addicts, suffering for their own moral failures. Sarah Milov’s breathtaking The Cigarette: A Political History explains how this happened. In telling this story, her narrative weaves together legal, political, and economic history in a manner that calls for a revaluation of the dimensions of twentieth-century liberalism and the nature of its decline. The book is a compelling exercise in historical synecdoche: its subject is the political history of the cigarette, but its story is that of the twentieth-century American state.

And one other choice bit:

Frankly, one could teach a course on twentieth-century legal history using this book as a textbook. It speaks to a broad range of subjects central to the interests of legal historians: the role of law in constituting capitalism; the interaction of law, gender, and race in the construction of social movements; the simultaneously emancipatory and constraining potential of framing policy preferences as rights; the profound role of the administrative state in structuring politics and policy; the rise of public interest litigation; the importance of understanding the legal history of agriculture, a field sorely neglected by legal historians.

Read on here.

-- Karen Tani

Weekend Roundup

• ASLH Secretary Anne Twitty on her recent discovery concerning  Old Miss’s Monument to White Supremacy, in The Atlantic. 

• The New York Times observed Juneteenth with this piece by Martha Jones (Johns Hopkins): "Ida, Maya, Rosa, Harriet: The Power in Our Names."

• Members of the Organization of American Historians can view online presentations of the papers and panels scheduled for its canceled annual meeting, including Brent Cebul, University of Pennsylvania, on the business appropriation of the language of community development (in the panel Leveraging Poverty: New Cities, New Partnerships, and the Progressive Abandonment of Urban Poverty in the 1980s and 1990s) and Unjust and Unequal: Death Investigations into Homicides in St. Louis, Missouri, 1875 to 1885, by Sarah Lirley McCune, Columbia College.

• The National History Center hosts a virtual congressional briefing on the history of vaccination usage and policy on Monday, June 22 at 11 a.m.  More.

• Searching for the real Nat Turner, but finding his ghost: a review of Christopher Tomlins’s In the Matter of Nat Turner: A Speculative History, in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

  

  Eleanor of Brittany (wiki)

• Gwen Seabourne, University of Bristol Law School, has posted Eleanor of Brittany and her Treatment by King John and Henry III, which she describes simply as a “study of the treatment of Eleanor of Brittany by successive kings of England.”  It will appear in Nottingham Medieval Studies.

• Is it just me, or does anyone else think more reporters should be referencing Al Brophy's Reconstructing the Dreamland?  DRE

• ICYMI: Annette Gordon-Reed on Growing Up with Juneteenth (New Yorker) and on the removal of Confederate statues (Harvard Gazette).  What Thurgood Marshall taught Cass Sunstein about police accountability (Star Tribune). Is 15 June 1215 the true date of Magna Carta? (BBC History).

  Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers.

News from NARA

[We are grateful to Mitch Fraas for forwarding this letter from David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States.  DRE]

National Archives, 1939 (LC)

Dear Researchers:

It seems like so long ago since we last saw you in our research rooms.

We miss seeing you and helping you with your research. The National Archives is committed to the health and safety of our staff, volunteers and the public. With the closure of our facilities, we have adjusted our operations to balance the need to conduct our mission-critical work while also adhering to safety guidelines from the federal government. National Archives staff has continued to serve the public by responding to as many inquiries as possible while working remotely. Many of our services are available online:

• The National Archives Catalog contains archival descriptions of our holdings and is the online portal to our digital records.

• National Archives staff is responding to reference questions or requests for records sent to inquire@nara.gov and to specific units’ email addresses.

• Researchers can ask—or answer—research questions on History Hub, a crowdsourced history research platform sponsored by the National Archives. Researchers can also search History Hub to see if a question has already been asked and answered.

• Members of the public can explore our online resources by visiting http://www.archives.gov and viewing our online exhibits. • Teachers and parents can use our educational resources. • Everyone can help the whole community by volunteering in our Citizen Archivist Missions.

• The National Archives’ Presidential Libraries and Museums web site includes online education resources, virtual programs and exhibits, and information on conducting remote research at the 14 Libraries. We have also been using this time to undertake projects that will have long-term benefits for public access. 2 National Archives staff has been working remotely to create and update finding aid data to enhance your research. Since March 16, we have added 234,139 archival descriptions and 6,477,642 digitized pages to the National Archives Catalog. Staff has also been tagging and transcribing records in the Catalog. Transcribing records, especially hand-written documents, makes these records easier to find.

Since March, the number of available tags and transcriptions in the Catalog has tripled. The Catalog now provides over 115 million digital copies of our holdings and we continue to add more every day. Sign up for our Catalog Newsletter to find out about new additions to the Catalog and projects that you can do with us. Check out our popular Record Group Explorer, a finding aid that provides visualizations of the data in our Catalog and provides simple paths into the records. The work we are currently doing better positions us to make access happen while at the same time helping to keep you and our staff safe. Nevertheless, we understand that our remote services are not a substitute for being physically in the research room. We know you are anxious to return, and we are too.

At this point, we cannot tell you when that will be possible. We are working diligently on our plans for the gradual reopening of our facilities across the country, in consultation with our colleagues at the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian. The reopening plans will be based on guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Office of Personnel Management, and the Office of Management and Budget, as well as information from subject matter experts from within and outside of the federal government. The reopening of each research room will occur based on our assessment of local conditions against a set of established criteria.

We are also looking at how we can promote the safety, health, and well-being of our staff, volunteers, and the public when we do reopen our facilities for research. This will mean changes to promote social distancing, changes to cleaning procedures for shared spaces and equipment, and some process changes. We will communicate with you about these changes as we get closer to reopening. After we reopen, we will provide opportunities for you to engage with us as we work to improve the researcher experience while also keeping everyone safe. Thank you for your patience as we carry out our mission during this unprecedented time. We send our best wishes for your good health and wellbeing, and we look forward to the day when we can welcome you back to our facilities.

Sincerely, David S. Ferriero

Archivist of the United States

[Also: NARA find the "Juneteenth" order.   WaPo.]

Talking Legal History: Chase's "We Are Not Slaves"

A new episode of Talking Legal History, a podcast hosted by Siobhan M. M. Barco, is now up on the website of the American Society of Legal History.

In this episode, Siobhan talks with Robert Chase about his book, We Are Not Slaves: State Violence, Coerced Labor, and Prisoners’ Rights in Postwar America (University of North Carolina Press, 2020). Chase is Associate Professor of History at Stony Brook University.

In We Are Not Slaves, Chase draws from three decades of legal documents compiled by prisoners to narrate the struggle to change prison from within. Told from the vantage point of the prisoners themselves, this book weaves together untold but devastatingly important truths from the histories of labor, civil rights, and politics in the United States as it narrates the transition from prison plantations of the past to the mass incarceration of today.

This episode is part of a series featuring legal history works from UNC Press. Support for the production of this series was provided by the Versatile Humanists at Duke program.

--Dan Ernst

Empires of Vice: On Doing a Written Book Interview via Email

This is the third in a series of posts about my book, Empires of Vice.  

My previous post dwelled on the archives that informed my understanding of how local colonial administrators shaped the rise of opium prohibition across Southeast Asia between the 1890s and 1940s. In this post, I’d like to share my experience talking about archives and method in an interview for The Docket (March 2020).

This was a fully written interview. Via email, I received five very thoughtful questions that were written in a conversational tone from the team at the Docket. Within two weeks, I sent back my 2,700 word response in a word document. In less than 48 hours, I received a url for a “stub” webpage—a draft of the online layout of the text and illustrating images—with an opportunity to correct any typos and suggest changes.

Perhaps it is a truism to say that good questions make answering them easier. The Docket team made it additionally fun; first, by giving me an opportunity to talk about my book cover. Mine is an image of poppy overlaid on an opium ledger from French Indochina, which I had encountered at the Archives nationales d’outre mer in Aix-en-Provence and puzzled a lot over. The ledger was orderly, with neat headings for both territory-specific and aggregated numbers—for opium revenue, total opium consumption, and per capital consumption—from 1899, when the French first introduced a colony-wide opium monopoly, to 1908. By explaining the ledger itself, I found it possible to speak more concretely about how and why I came to focus on local administrators. The ledger was, in effect, a partial and “cooked” version of French Indochina’s state-opium market relationships, and much of my archival research involved excavating backstories of who produced the numbers, headings, and categories; how and why they chose to include and omit certain information. Thanks to the “in” of the book cover, I was able to elaborate on how I followed paper trails of local administrators, which revealed fictitious opium sales numbers in the 1910s, hidden emergency funds for buying opium from India and China in the 1920s, and debt crises and odd situations of excess opium left rotting in the basement of the Bank of Indochina in the 1930s.  

A second very helpful question allowed me to talk about sources and method by citing my own text. I was asked: “[Y]ou include this beautiful quote from the novelist and scholar Amitav Ghosh that when consumed opium was “at once bountiful and all devouring, merciful and destructive, sustaining and vengeful”…You also give us some pretty funny, colorful language from local critics such as “Simple Simon” (147). This contrasts, of course, with the cold, technical language of imperial administrators. How much of a challenge was it to have to bridge these linguistic worlds as you assembled this narrative?” What made this sort of question especially welcome was how it helped anchor my answer about approaching a colonial bureaucracy from the inside out in specific examples. I enjoyed elaborating on the tension between the language of observers like “Simple Simon” in Singapore (who was writing in the Straits Times, publicly excoriating the British administrator Arthur Pountney for designing an opium revenue reserve replacement fund, analogized to the stench of a rat) and what Pountney himself was writing about the same fund at the time for his peers and superiors.

On a practical note, I found this written style of interview one of the most time efficient ones. Although my responses were quite long, the text was not difficult to write because it was a similar style of writing used my book. Also, none of the interview questions came as a surprise, both because I had two weeks to mull through them and because they came from another academic, for a scholarly venue so I didn’t feel the pressure to make my argument “legible” (in ways that I would for a non-academic audience).

One thing I might do differently in retrospect, is to take up The Docket’s invitation to add questions of my own. I’ve noticed that just about every interviewer provides this option (and/or to tweak the questions provided). Until now, I’ve been shy about doing so, and tried to focus on providing the best answer to the questions posed, in the given order. In written interviews especially, because there is no direct back-and-forth conversation, it can feel like the list of emailed questions is a fixed guideline. But, there is a great deal of leeway to develop and refine a script of questions collaboratively.

Here are a few exemplary written interviews that I’ve learned a lot from authors with recently published first books:

·      On Fei-Hsien Wang’s Pirates and Publishers: A Social History of Copyright in Modern China with the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University.

·      On Durba Mitra’s Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought for the Harvard Gazette.

·      On Andy Liu’s Tea War: A History of Capitalism in China and India for the New School’s India China Institute.

My next posts will revisit my book’s argument about low-level colonial administrators for audiences interested in the state, especially theories of modern state building and symbolic power. I’ll also dwell on additional styles of book interviews, including a transcribed and edited text based on a zoom conversation and a podcast. 

In the meantime, the new June 2020 issue of The Docket has just been posted online. It’s a fascinating issue on the history and legacies of age of consent laws, guest edited by Kanika Sharma and Laura Lammasniemi. Do check it out!

-Diana Kim

American Political Economy: The Summer School

[ We have the following announcement.  DRE]

Call for Applications: First Annual Summer School on the American Political Economy
Organizers: Jacob Hacker, Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, Paul Pierson, and Kathleen Thelen

We invite advanced graduate students (ABD), post-docs, and junior faculty members to apply to
participate in the first annual summer school on the American Political Economy, to be held
virtually from August 10 to 13. The workshop will involve about 2-3 hours of virtual discussions
each day (with breaks) in the early afternoon Eastern Time.

The summer school represents an effort to build a research community around the study of
markets and governments in the United States in comparative perspective. This involves research
questions about the political and economic power of private-sector firms, the structure of labor
markets and worker organizations, social welfare programs, finance and corporate governance,
education and training, and racial capitalism, among many, many others. Crucially, many of
these questions can only be tackled by understanding how the United States compares to other
countries, especially other rich democracies.

We believe this area of research holds extraordinary promise—both for understanding the
dramatic transformation of America’s distinctive political economy over recent decades and for
reorienting political science in productive directions. Yet we also believe there is a very large
gap between what we know and what we need to know.

Building on ongoing research by the summer school conveners and others, participants in this
workshop will have the opportunity to…
(1) Learn the foundations of an American Political Economy approach to political science;
(2) Participate in in-depth discussions around several key issues in American Political Economy,
including federalism, social welfare policy, racial capitalism, corporate governance, and labor
markets;
(3) Share research-in-progress and research designs for feedback; and
(4) Join a community of other scholars interested in pursuing research on the American Political
Economy.

To apply, please submit a C.V. and a cover letter (no more than two pages) describing your
relevant research interests in APE and how this workshop will advance those interests. Please
also submit a relevant research paper (either work in progress or already published work). For
graduate students, the C.V. should include classes taken.

Please email these materials and any questions to apesummerschool@gmail.com no later than
midnight on June 19. We anticipate informing selected applicants within two weeks. We
anticipate selecting about 10-15 participants.

The summer school is generously supported by the Hewlett Foundation.

Landauer on Alexandrowicz and international law

Carl Landauer, international lawyer, has published "The Polish Rider: CH Alexandrowicz and the reorientation of international law, Part I: Madras studies" in London Review of International Law, vol.7, issue 3, pp.321-52. Here's the abstract: 

This article analyses the prominent international legal historian, CH Alexandrowicz, known largely for his advocating of the East’s imprint on international law. It places his perspective of the East and South, and his diachronic narrative—the rise of naturalism, its fall to positivism, and eventual promise of return from positivism—in the context of his own traversing of geographies and his intellectual commitments, including his study of the Indian Constitution.

Further information is available here.

--posted by Mitra Sharafi 

Alabama Justice: Cases and Faces that Changed a Nation

[We have the following from the website of the Supreme Court History Society.  DRE]

Hugo Black, J. (LC)

The ABA’s Silver Gavel Awards, which recognize outstanding work that fosters the public’s understanding of law and the legal system, chose “Alabama Justice: The Cases and Faces That Changed a Nation” as a 2020 Finalist in its Multimedia Category. The exhibit is the brainchild of Steven P. Brown, political science professor at Auburn University who was the winner of the SCHS’s Hughes-Gossett Award in 2017. It can be viewed [here.]

The exhibit focuses on the 8 Supreme Court cases from the state of Alabama: Powell v. Alabama (1932) (effective counsel, due process); NAACP v. Alabama (1958) (freedom of association); Gomillion v. Lightfoot (1960) (racial gerrymandering); The New York Times v. Sullivan (1964) (libel laws, actual malice); Katzenbach v. McClung (1964) (Civil Rights Act); Reynolds v. Sims (1964) (malapportioned legislative districts); Frontiero v. Richardson  (1973) (gender discrimination); and Wallave v. Jaffree (1984) (school prayer). Additionally, it provides profiles of the three Justices appointed from Alabama: John McKinley of Huntsville, John Archibald Campbell of Mobile and Hugo L. Black of Ashland.

Resh on the Administrative Presidency and the Degradation of the Civil Service

William G. Resh, University of Southern California Sl Price School of Public Policy, has posted The Administrative Presidency and the Degradation of the United States Civil Service through Political Time, which is forthcoming in the Handbook of Public Administration (Routledge):

The study of the administrative presidency is one that more obviously, though not uniquely, overlaps the research interests of both self-identifying public management and political science scholars. How a president’s managerial strategies are applied has profound implications on how one thinks about the role of federal public administrators in the United States’ polity and constitutional design. However, those strategies are not merely a function of the preferences and agency of a given president or presidential administration. Time presents a critical, if overlooked, macro-level embeddedness attribute in which individual decisions and behavior are nested. The timing in which a president operates within a political epoch and his ideological positioning vis-à-vis the dominant ideology within that epoch will have a vast influence on the alternative sets that are allowed for that president, his proxies, and career bureaucrats to consider. In this essay, I seek to bridge this macro-perspective of public administration with the micro-level foundations of behavioralism by providing an example of how these secular, historical trends can produce observable and predictable patterns by which we can assess variation of executive and bureaucratic behaviors across temporal contexts.

–Dan Ernst

Bohrer on the Attempt to Try the Kaiser

Ziv Bohrer, Bar-Ilan University Faculty of Law, has posted The (Failed) Attempt to Try the Kaiser and the Long (Forgotten) History of International Criminal Law: Thoughts Following The Trial of the Kaiser by William A Schabas, which appears in the Israel Law Review 53 (2020): 159-186

Kaiser Wilhelm II (NYPL)

The conventional historic account maintains that International Criminal Law (ICL) was ‘born’ after the Second World War. This account is incomplete, as William Schabas’s book – The Trial of the Kaiser (2018) – captivatingly shows, by richly portraying the (aborted) First World War initiative to try the German Kaiser in an international tribunal. But, this article (after providing an overview of Schabas’s book) argues that Schabas’s account, of a First World War ICL ‘birth’, is also incomplete. First World War-era ICL was but one link in a much longer historical chain. The article demonstrates this fact by presenting certain elements of ICL’s long (forgotten) history that provide answers to questions that have been left unanswered, not only by the conventional account (of a Second World War ICL ‘birth’), but also by Schabas’s account (of a First World War ICL ‘birth’). As the article shortly discusses, the unveiling of a greater ICL history indicates that international criminal tribunals were not a modern innovation, as well as reveals the origins of ‘crimes against humanity’, of ‘aggression’ and of the universal jurisdiction doctrine. The article further discusses reasons for the dis-remembrance of ICL’s long history, the importance of acknowledging that history and the likelihood of it becoming widely acknowledged any time soon. 

--Dan Ernst

Acevedo on Crime Fantasies

John Acevedo, Alabama Law, has posted Crime Fantasies, which appeared in the American Journal of Criminal Law 46 (2019): 194-240:

Trial of George Jacobs for Witchcraft (NYPL)

Throughout American history the public has been gripped by fantasies of criminal activity. These crime fantasies manifest in two distinct but related typologies: witch-hunts and crime panics. On the one hand, witch-hunts target individuals based on their beliefs and are exemplified by the two Red Scares of the early and mid-twentieth century and the persecution of the Quakers in seventeenth century Massachusetts Bay. These are fundamentally distinct from crime panics, which target activity that was already classified as criminal but do so in a way that exacerbate deep procedural deficiencies in the criminal justice system. Crime panics are exemplified by the Salem witchcraft trials and the “Satanic Panic” of the 1980s and 1990s. President Trump’s relentless focus on undocumented immigration can be seen as a partially successful attempt to create a crime panic, while, perhaps surprisingly, the investigation by Robert Mueller is neither a witch-hunt nor a crime panic. By bringing ongoing criminal law issues into conversation with legal history scholarship, this article clarifies our understanding of the relationship between politics and large-scale criminal investigations and highlights areas for future reform.

--Dan Ernst

Phipps on medieval women and urban justice

Teresa Phipps (Swansea University) has published Medieval women and urban justice: Commerce, crime and community in England, 1300-1500 with Manchester University Press. From the publisher:

This book provides a detailed analysis of women's involvement in litigation and other legal actions within their local communities in late-medieval England. It draws upon the rich records of three English towns - Nottingham, Chester and Winchester - and their courts to bring to life the experiences of hundreds of women within the systems of local justice. Through comparison of the records of three towns, and of women's roles in different types of legal action, the book reveals the complex ways in which individual women's legal status could vary according to their marital status, different types of plea and the town that they lived in. At this lowest level of medieval law, women's status was malleable, making each woman's experience of justice unique.

 Here's the Table of Contents: 

Introduction

1 Women, town courts and customary law in context

2 Commerce, credit and coverture: women and debt litigation

3 Law and the regulation of women's work

4 Violence, property and 'bad speech': women and trespass litigation

5 Public disorder, policing and misbehaving women

Conclusion

Further information is available here.

--posted by Mitra Sharafi

Empires of Vice: For Those Interested in Opium and Archives

My book, Empires of Vice, puzzles over the anti-opium turn of European empires across Southeast Asia. For most of the 19^th century, opium was a lucrative and officially defended source of tax revenue for colonial states across the region, accounting for over 50% of locally collected revenue in certain territories. “Opium was one of those things,” announced the British politician George Campbell before the House of Commons in 1875, “which enabled us to serve God and Mammon at the same time.”

Into the first half of the 20^th century however, opium became a dangerous substance that no respectable empire would openly acknowledge taxing for profit. Empires of Vice explores this reversal—opium’s transformation from fiscal bedrock to banned drug—by comparing British and French experiences across today’s Burma, Cambodia, Laos, Malaysia, Singapore, and Vietnam. Through the lens of opium prohibition, this book asks more generally how European powers were able to reconfigure the economic foundations and discursive justifications for colonial governance across Southeast Asia.

My main argument, in a nutshell, is that administrators stationed locally in the colonies played a pivotal role. Anti-opium reforms were made possible through the pedestrian work of on-site bureaucrats, who constructed official problems relating to opium and delegitimized its economic life. Unlike many histories that focus on external pressures to ban opium from religiously-inspired moral crusaders and transnational activists, I look inside the colonial states, focusing on the anxieties of administrative actors most intimately involved in taxing and regulating opium.

Throughout my book, I use the language of the “surprising strength of weak actors”—paraphrasing from Mark Granovetter—to capture how seemingly mundane, repetitive and habitual everyday tasks of mid- and low-level bureaucrats generated officialized “facts” and numbers that served as evidentiary bases for anti-opium reforms. My understanding of colonial administrators was very much shaped by the archives of the British and French opium monopolies. In Southeast Asia, these colonial institutions operated from the 1890s until the 1940s, formally under Departments of Excise and Finance.

When I first encountered their annual reports, I thought I would glean a general picture of a colony’s opium revenue trends over time and opium-related legal administrative approach. I also braced myself to be fairly bored by technical language and tedious details, tacitly assuming that the administrators were mere rule implementers.

Very quickly however, it became clear that there was no such thing as a general fiscal and regulatory picture for any colony. Indeed, the very notion of a coherent approach to anti-opium reforms was a fiction fashioned on international stages or a retrospective summary. I also found it impossible to simply skim through the reports because of their colorful language—sometimes funny and creative, sometimes irritating and offensive—strange numbers, as well as ways of narrating unresolved issues that read almost like cliffhangers.

I came to think of these aspects of the archival record as not oddities, but rather the most visible part of multiple underlying layers of bureaucratic activity. And I spent much of my time in national archives across Southeast Asia and Europe chasing authors—for instance, the bureaucrat who came up with the label “morally wrecked” for Burmese opium smokers, others who described them as “gregariousness in vice”—and trying to reconstruct their small, often narrow, and busy world of ideas.

It started to make sense to treat their writings as containing petty philosophies about morality and vice, as well as theories about the nature of the state and colonial political economies. I was especially indebted to the works of legal historians Bhavani Rahman on paperwork, Kalyani Ramnath on the construction of porous differences between law and fact, and Julie Stephens’ recent work on bureaucratic petitioning. From my perspective, administrative narratives represented amalgamations of partial and profoundly human attempts to describe and judge the lives of others, which contained the biases, mistakes, and hubris of actors who wrote them.

I elaborate on this approach in this interview with The Docket (March 2020), the digital imprint of Law and History Review. In my next post, I’ll share how I approached this written interview.  

-Diana Kim 

Weekend Roundup

• From the American Scholar, Farah Peterson (UVA Law) on "The Patriot Slave: The dangerous myth that blacks in bondage chose not to be free in revolutionary America." "The fantasy of the patriot slave continues to haunt us and to limit us," Peterson writes. "It is a tendency to think of black people as supporting characters in the national drama—not so much as a selfless people (on the contrary, we are often smeared as freeloaders) but as people without any real selves worth bothering about." 

• LHB Founder Mary L. Dudziak on “George Floyd Moves the World: The Legacy of Racial Protest in America and the Imperative of Reform” (Foreign Affairs).  Calling out racism, “as have millions of Americans in the past week, does not undermine the nation by revealing its well-known failings to the rest of the world,” she writes.  “The world has known of these failings for centuries.”

• Now online: The Docket, vol. 3, no. 2 (June, 2020), a special issue on the history and contemporary legacies of age of consent laws.

• The National History Center Webinar, Protest and Civil Unrest in the United States: An Historical Exploration, is up on YouTube.

• Over at Jotwell, Reuel Schiller reviews Sarah Milov's The Cigarette: A Political History (The Cigarette and the State).
  

• The Federal Judicial Center has been "live-tweeting" Schenck v. U.S (1919). 
  

• The University of Alabama at Birmingham has a notice of  Mulatto • Outlaw • Pilgrim • Priest: The Legal Case of José Soller, Accused of Impersonating a Pastor and Other Crimes in Seventeenth-century Spain (Brill), by John K. Moore Jr.

• Historians Matt Gabriele and Varsha Venkatsubramanian are hosting Drinking with Historians, a 30-minute Zoom conversation over drinks with a guest historian each Friday usually at 6pm ET. To catch Gautham Rao on July 3 and Karl Shoemaker on Aug.7, sign up here. More info here.

• ICYMI: Laura Edwards on the history of policing in WaPo and the Duke Chronicle.  "Why We Have the Third Amendment" (History Channel).  Maori pursue claims to the "Nelson Tenths" (RNZ).  Wesley M. Oliver on Dollree Mapp and the anachronistic exclusionary rule (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette). "History Strikes Back," says Steven Mintz (Inside Higher Ed).  Randall Kennedy on teaching a racial epithet (Volokh Conspiracy).

Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers. 

Parmet on Jacobson v. Massachusetts

Wendy E. Parmet, Northeastern University School of Law, has posted Rediscovering Jacobson in the Era of COVID-19, which is forthcoming in the Boston University Law Review Online:

As courts continue to hear constitutional challenges to COVID-related orders, citations to the Supreme Court’s 1905 decision, Jacobson v. Massachusetts, have been proliferating. This essay re-examines Justice Harlan’s nuanced and ambiguous opinion in Jacobson, situating in in its epidemiological and jurisprudential context. The essay also looks at Jacobson’s complex legacy, and how judges, including Chief Justice Roberts in South Bay United Pentecostal Church v. Newsom, have been applying Jacobson as they review COVID-19 social distancing orders.

--Dan Erns.  H/t: Legal Theory Blog

CFP: Imperial Artefacts

[We have the following announcement.  DRE]

Call for Papers: Imperial Artefacts. History, Law, and the Looting of Cultural Property

On 28 and 29 January 2021 the conference 'Imperial Artefacts: History, Law and the Looting of Cultural Property' takes place at Leiden University. Key note speakers during the conference are Prof. Dr. Jürgen Zimmerer (Chair for Global History at Hamburg University & Head of the Research Centre ”Hamburg’s (Post)Colonial Legacy”) and Dr. Matthias Goldmann (Junior Prof. for International Public Law and Financial Law at Frankfurt University). The organisers of the conference welcome paper proposals for 20 minute presentations. The deadline for submitting proposals is 31 August 2020.

Diamond v. Chakrabarty at 40

[We have the following announcement.  DRE]

WEBINAR: Patents on Life: Diamond v. Chakrabarty at 40 (June 17, 1pm EDT), Wednesday, June 17, 2020, 1:00 – 2:30 PM (EDT).  This webinar is free and open to the public. No advance registration is required.  CLICK HERE TO JOIN THE LIVE WEBINAR.

In June 1980, the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Diamond v. Chakrabarty authorized the first patent on an intentionally genetically modified organism and concluded that patents may be granted for “anything under the sun that is made by man.” The decision contributed to the rise of the modern biotechnology industry and reshaped the agriculture industry. Less well known, the Plant Protection Act of 1930 had previously allowed intellectual property protection for selectively bred and cloned plants. On the 40th anniversary of Diamond v. Chakrabarty and the 90th anniversary of the Plant Protection Act, our expert panel will discuss breakthroughs in agricultural biotechnology and explore the impacts – economic and environmental – of these two major historical turning points. How did the rise of patented, GMO crops change farming? How did the Supreme Court’s decision change the patent system? How did developments in biotechnology reshape America’s innovation system?

 We will take questions through the web portal following brief opening presentations and an initial discussion among the panelists.

PANELISTS:

• Ananda M. Chakrabarty, inventor and distinguished professor of microbiology and immunology at the University of Illinois Chicago College of Medicine

• Dan Charles, science writer, National Public Radio food and agriculture correspondent

• Daniel Kevles, Stanley Woodward Professor Emeritus of History, History of Medicine & American Studies, Yale University

• Jennie Schmidt, farmer, registered dietitian nutritionist, and blogger at The Foodie Farmer

• Moderator: Arthur Daemmrich, Director, Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation, Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History

Closing Remarks: Sean O’Connor, Executive Director & Senior Scholar, Center for the Protection of Intellectual Property, Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University

Details here.  Real-time captioning (CART) for the live webinar will be provided. Please send an email to nmahprograms@si.edu with any other accessibility needs.  This webinar is co-presented by The Smithsonian’s Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation, and the Center for the Protection of Intellectual Property (CPIP) at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School.

Phang, Goh & Soh on Singapore Law

Andrew Phang, Yihan Goh, and Jerrold Soh, Singapore Management University School of Law, have posted The Development of Singapore Law: A Bicentennial Retrospective, which is forthcoming in the Singapore Academy of Law Journal:

The present article reviews (in broad brushstrokes) the status of Singapore law during its bicentennial year. It is not only about origins but also about growth – in particular, the autochthonous or indigenous growth of the Singapore legal system (particularly since the independence of Singapore as a nation state on 9 August 1965). The analysis of this growth is divided into quantitative as well as qualitative parts. In particular, the former constitutes an empirical analysis which attempts – for the very first time − to tell the development of Singapore law through numbers, building on emerging techniques in data visualisation and empirical legal studies.

–Dan Ernst