Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-hc48f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T13:26:41.740Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

On Mobile Legal Spaces and Maritime Empires: The Pillage of the East Indiaman Osterley (1779)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 September 2018

Nathan Perl-Rosenthal
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article uses a legal case from the French Indian Ocean empire during the American Revolutionary War (ca. 1778–1780) to explore the operation of mobile legal spaces: that is, law-filled spaces that moved (such as ships) or which were highly shaped by movement in and out of them (ports). These types of spaces, characteristic of early modern seaborne European empires, created distinctive problems and opportunities for those navigating imperial rule, both rulers and ruled. In particular, the essay argues that the mobility of legal spaces added significant spatial and temporal dimensions to the well-known legal diversity and pluralism of the early modern world. In mobile spaces, legal regimes might overlap or conflict temporarily, be relevant for only a fixed period of time, or come into force when a ship reached a particular location. Recognising the ubiquity of these mobile legal spaces and the powerful effects that they had can change how we understand the functioning of law in colonial empires.

Keywords

Legal pluralismlegal spacesmaritime lawMauritiusFrench empire
Type
Articles
Information
Itinerario , Volume 42 , Special Issue 2: The Indian Ocean of Law: Hybridity and Space , August 2018 , pp. 183 - 201
Copyright
© 2018 Research Institute for History, Leiden University 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

Nathan Perl-Rosenthal is associate professor of history and spatial sciences at the University of Southern California. His first book, a history of nationality in revolutionary America, is Citizen Sailors: Becoming American in the Age of Revolution. He is currently working on a cultural history of the Atlantic age of revolutions, circa 1760s to 1820s.

References

Bibliography

Unpublished primary sources Google Scholar
Archives Nationales, ParisGoogle Scholar
Dossiers individuels, Personnel de la Marine, MAR C/7/295Google Scholar
Lettres du chevalier de St. Orens, 1777–1780, Campagnes, MAR B/4/150Google Scholar
British Library, LondonGoogle Scholar
Correspondence of the East India Company Directors, IOR/H/143Google Scholar
Centre d’Archives d’Outre-Mer, Aix-en-ProvenceGoogle Scholar
Greffes Île Maurice, Juridiction royale et d’amirauté, 1779–1786, Procédures criminelles, 6 DPPC 3086–3088, Dépôt des papiers publics des colonies (6 DPPC)Google Scholar
Published primary sources Google Scholar
The Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine Google Scholar
Boucher, P. B. Institution au droit maritime ouvrage complet sur la législation maritime, ayant pour base l’ordonnance de 1681... Paris: Chez Levrault, Schoell et Cie., 1803.Google Scholar
Guyot, Joseph-Nicolas. Répertoire universel et raisonné de jurisprudence civile, criminelle, canonique et bénéficiale. 17 vols. Paris: Visse, 1784-1785.Google Scholar
Marsden, Reginald G. Documents Relating to Law and Custom of the Sea. 2 vols. London: Printed for the Navy Records Society, 1915.Google Scholar
Pistoye, Alphonse, and Charles Duverdy. Traité des prises maritimes dans lequel on a refondu en partie le traité de valin en l’appropriant à la législation nouvelle. 2 vols. Paris: A. Durand, 1855.Google Scholar
Sartoris, Jean-Pierre. Elémens de la procédure criminelle, suivant les ordonnances de France, les Constitutions de Savoye, et les Edits de Genève. 2 vols. Amsterdam, 1773.Google Scholar
Tillette de Mautort, Louis-François de Paule, ed. Mémoires du chevalier de Mautort, capitaine au régiment d’Austrasie, chevalier de l’ordre royal et militaire de Saint-Louis (1752–1802). Paris: E. Plon, Nourrit et Cie., 1895.Google Scholar
Valin, René-Josué. Nouveau commentaire sur l’ordonnance de la marine, du mois d’août 1681. New rev. ed. 4 vols. 1760; repr. La Rochelle: J. Legier, 1776.Google Scholar

Secondary sources

Allen, Richard Blair. Slaves, Freedmen, and Indentured Laborers in Colonial Mauritius. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.Google Scholar
Andrews, Richard Mowery. Law, Magistracy, and Crime in Old Regime Paris, 1735–1789. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.Google Scholar
Bayly, C. A. Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.Google Scholar
Bayly, C. A.. Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World, 1780–1830. London: Longman, 1989.Google Scholar
Benton, Lauren. Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.Google Scholar
Benton, Lauren. “Legal Spaces of Empire: Piracy and the Origins of Ocean Regionalism.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 47:4 (October 2005): 700–724.Google Scholar
Benton, Lauren. A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009.Google Scholar
Benton, Lauren. “Spatial Histories of Empire.” Itinerario 30:3 (2006): 19–34.Google Scholar
Benton, Lauren and Lisa Ford. Rage for Order: The British Empire and the Origins of International Law, 1800-1850. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2016.Google Scholar
Blomley, Nicholas, Delaney, David and Braverman, Irus. eds. The Expanding Spaces of Law: A Timely Legal Geography. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2014.Google Scholar
Bourguignon, Henry J. Sir William Scott, Lord Stowell, Judge of the High Court of Admiralty, 1798–1828. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987.Google Scholar
Cabantous, Alain. La vergue et les fers : Mutins et deserteurs dans la marine de l’ancienne France. Paris: Tallandier, 1984.Google Scholar
Chelin, Antoine. Maurice, une île et son passé. Sainte-Clotilde, Île de la Réunion: Bibliothèque indianocéanienne, Centre de recherche indianocéanique 1989.Google Scholar
Cohn, Bernard S. Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996.Google Scholar
Cooper, Frederick. Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.Google Scholar
Dening, Greg. Mr. Bligh’s Bad Language: Passion, Power, and Theatre on the Bounty. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.Google Scholar
Drayton, Richard. “Knowledge and Empire.” In The Oxford History of the British Empire, II: The Eighteenth Century, edited by P. J. Marshall, 231–252. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.Google Scholar
Dumas, Auguste. “Le conseil des prises sous l’ancien régime xviie et xviiie siècles.” Nouvelle revue historique de droit français et étranger XIX (1905): 317–377.Google Scholar
Dumas, Auguste. Etude sur le jugement des prises maritimes en France jusqu’à la supprsession de l’office d’amiral (1627). Paris: Larose, 1908.Google Scholar
Elliott, Byron K. and Elliott, William F.. A Treatise on the Law of Evidence. Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1904.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France, 1977–78. Edited by Michel Sennelart and translated by Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.Google Scholar
Fusaro, M., Allaire, B., Blakemore, R. and Vanneste, T. U.. eds. Law, Labour, and Empire: Comparative Perspectives on Seafarers, c. 1500–1800. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.Google Scholar
Gould, Eliga H. “Zones of Law, Zones of Violence: The Legal Geography of the British Atlantic, Circa 1772.” William and Mary Quarterly 60:3 (2003).Google Scholar
Kaplan, Steven L. Provisioning Paris: Merchants and Millers in the Grain and Flour Trade During the Eighteenth Century. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984.Google Scholar
Keber, Martha L. Seas of Gold, Seas of Cotton: Christophe Poulain DuBignon of Jekyll Island. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002.Google Scholar
Kessler, Amalia D. A Revolution in Commerce: The Parisian Merchant Court and the Rise of Commercial Society in Eighteenth-Century France. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007.Google Scholar
Kuscinski, Auguste. Dictionnaire des conventionnels, 4 vols. 1916; repr. Brueil-en-Vexin: Éditions du Vexin Français, 1973.Google Scholar
Le Guellaff, Florence. Armements en course et droit des prises maritimes (1792–1856). Nancy: Presses universitaires de Nancy, 1999.Google Scholar
Linebaugh, Peter and Rediker, Marcus. The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. Boston: Beacon Press, 2000.Google Scholar
McClellan, James E. III. Colonialism and Science: Saint Domingue in the Old Regime. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.Google Scholar
McCusker, John J. Rum and the American Revolution: The Rum Trade and the Balance of Payments of the Thirteen Continental Colonies. New York: Garland, 1989.Google Scholar
Morieux, Renaud. Une mer pour deux royaumes : La manche, frontière franco-anglaise xviie-xviiie siècles. Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2008.Google Scholar
Muir, Edward. Microhistory and the Lost Peoples of Europe. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991.Google Scholar
Paul, Louis José. Deux siècles d’histoire de la police à l’île Maurice: 1768–1968. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1997.Google Scholar
Perl-Rosenthal, Nathan. “La mise en oeuvre des libertés révolutionnaires au sein de la marine : États-Unis 1775–1780 & France 1789–1792.” Mémoire de maîtrise, Paris IV-Sorbonne, 2005.Google Scholar
Pérotin-Dumon, Anne. La ville aux Îles, la ville dans l’île: Basse-Terre et Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe, 1650–1820. Paris: Karthala, 2000.Google Scholar
Ploscowe, Morris. “Development of Inquisitorial and Accusatorial Elements in French Procedure.” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 23:3 (Fall 1932): 372–394.Google Scholar
Pritchard, James Stewart. Louis XV’s Navy, 1748–1762: A Study of Organization and Administration. Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1987.Google Scholar
Raffety, Matthew T. The Republic Afloat: Law, Honor, and Citizenship in Maritime America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013.Google Scholar
Rediker, Marcus. Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.Google Scholar
Ritchie, Robert C. Captain Kidd and the War Against the Pirates. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986.Google Scholar
Rodger, N. A. M. The Wooden World: An Anatomy of the Georgian Navy. New York: Norton, 1996.Google Scholar
Scott, James C. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. Yale Agrarian Studies. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998.Google Scholar
Sonenscher, Michael. Work and Wages: Natural Law, Politics, and Eighteenth-Century French Trades. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.Google Scholar
Toussaint, Auguste. Une cité tropicale, Port-Louis de l’Île Maurice. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1966.Google Scholar
Truxes, Thomas M. Defying Empire: Trading with the Enemy in Colonial New York. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008.Google Scholar
Vaughan, Megan. Creating the Creole Island: Slavery in Eighteenth-Century Mauritius. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005.Google Scholar
Wood, Laurie M. “Îles De France: Law and Empire in the French Atlantic and Indian Oceans, 1680–1780.” PhD diss., University of Texas at Austin 2013.Google Scholar