Making Empire: Writing the 1833 Ceylon Charter of Justice and Curial Reform in the British empire
- Publisher:
- Routledge
- Publication Type:
- Chapter
- Citation:
- Legal Histories of Empire: Navigating Legalities, 2025, pp. 82-104
- Issue Date:
- 2025
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| Making Empire: Writing the 1833 Ceylon Charter of Justice and Curial Reform in the British empire.pdf | Accepted version | 332.94 kB |
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Over an almost twenty-year period, from the late eighteenth century, Britain obtained a number of new colonies. These acquisitions resulted from the general crises in Europe as a result of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. This acquisition, then, required that these newly acquired colonies be somehow legally integrated into the Empire. This was not just a matter of accommodating colonies which were socially, culturally, racially and legally diverse; it was a matter of folding them into the legal framework of the Empire itself. One mechanism for this ‘enfolding' was the re-working of, or creation of, new Charters of Justice. This chapter examines one of these Charters, that of Ceylon in 1833, focusing in particular on the complex process of drafting the Charter. Ceylon, with its Roman-Dutch legal traditions, inclusion in the Eastern Commission of Inquiry (ECI), Benthamite-leaning Commissioner, experienced Chief Justice and regional and metropolitan connections, provides a unique lens for consideration of the wider process reform. The chapter concludes that Charters not only effected legal reorganisation internally to the colonies, but that together they constituted an important component of the legal framework of an expanding Empire itself, crucial to the process of binding new colonies to the broader Empire and the making of Empire itself.
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