// Panel 2A //
Legal Histories of Crime and Empire

Discussant: Professor Lisa Ford // University of New South Wales // History

Abstracts

Siddharth Narrain // University of New South Wales // Law

‘Lighting a Match in a Powder Keg’: Combustible Publics, and the Legal Regulation of ‘Hate Speech’ in Colonial India

In this paper I will examine how the substantive criminal law provisions regulating ‘hate speech’ in India was conceptualised and legislated in colonial India within a specific historical, social and political context. In doing so I will trace the historical evolution of these laws, which is tied to British colonial policies that sought to define and regulate hate speech through criminal provisions in the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and associated laws in the mid to late 19th century. Drawing on existing research in this area and legal materials, I will argue that these laws were drafted by British colonial authorities (and Indian lawmakers at the time) based on the assumption that Indian publics were distinguishable from their British counterparts in that they were more ‘combustible’ based on a history of pre-existing community, religion and caste-based conflict and cleavages.

Biography

Siddharth Narrain is a lawyer and currently a 3rd Year PhD candidate at the Faculty of Law & Justice, UNSW, Sydney. His PhD thesis is titled ‘The Legal Regulation of Hate Speech Online, Virality and Crowds in Contemporary India’. Siddharth has worked previously as an Assistant Professor (Visiting) at the School of Law, Governance & Citizenship, Ambedkar University Delhi; as a Research Associate with the Sarai Programme, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi; as a lawyer with the Alternative Law Forum, Bangalore; and as a journalist with The Hindu Group of publications, Delhi.

Dr Stacey Hynd // University of Exeter // History

The Meaning of Murder: Historical Genealogies of Murder and Homicide in the Gold Coast/Ghana, c.1850-1950

How can murder be the ‘ultimate crime’ in a colony, deserving of the ‘extreme penalty of the law’, and also be seen as an unexceptional form of criminal violence that was not threatening to colonial order? This paper explores historical genealogies of imperial/colonial and local understandings of the crime of murder in British Africa, taking the Gold Coast/Ghana as a case study, from the establishment of colonial criminal jurisdiction following the Bond of 1844 to the late colonial era. It uses legal and criminal history approaches to chronologically explore 3 flashpoints around understandings of what was, and was not, murder, and how it should be prosecuted. Firstly, it highlights nineteenth-century tensions between imperial and local (especially Akan) understandings of murder. Secondly, it explores the line between murder and manslaughter, and shifting ideas of provocation in 1920-30s. Thirdly, it shows how victimology reframes perceptions of murder, particularly when colonial rule comes under threat. The paper’s evidence base is drawn from evidence from murder trial records, ethnographic and legal writings, crime and sentencing statistics, and trial transcripts from the ‘Murder Books’ in PRAAD archives, Accra, with a focus on the Colony and Ashanti.

Biography

Stacey Hynd completed her D.Phil. at Oxford, lectured at Cambridge and is now Senior Lecturer in African History and Co-Director for the Centre for Imperial and Global History at Exeter. She has researched capital punishment, prisons, domestic violence and juvenile delinquency in colonial African history, and child soldiering in global/African history. Her work has been published in journals including Journal of African History, International Journal of African Studies, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Gender & History and Crime, History & Society. Her forthcoming monograph with Bloomsbury is Imperial Gallows: Murder, Violence and the Death Penalty in British Colonial Africa.