Problems of protection, concerns of evidence: Concepts and laws in the British Empire
Stefan Vogenauer, Matilde Cazzola
The Max Planck Partner Group ‘Problems of protection, concerns of evidence’ is led by Matilde Cazzola, in cooperation with Stefan Vogenauer, and is based at the University of Bologna. It aims to promote scientific cooperation between the Bologna Department of History and Cultures and the Department ‘European and Comparative Legal History’ at the mpilhlt around the study of legal concepts and practices drawn from the history of the 19th-century British Empire.
More particularly, the purpose of the Partner Group is to explore the legal history of imperial humanitarianism, in its various manifestations, by adopting an interdisciplinary perspective combining the approaches of British imperial history and the history of political and legal thought, the interests of social history and biographical history, and the meticulous gaze of microhistory, firmly grounded in archival research.
The Partner Group articulates its research agenda around different, yet intimately related, foci. The first focus is the policy of so-called ‘internal’ protection in the British Empire, which has attracted heightened scholarly interest in the past years. During the 19th century, imperial administrators sought to address the violence that the Empire had caused globally through enslavement, colonisation and indentured labour by establishing Protectorates of Slaves, Aborigines and Immigrants/Emigrants across jurisdictions. Staffed by officers from different paths of life, including missionaries, soldiers and interpreters, Protectorates were installed as social and legal offices to extend British imperial control over different categories of colonised subjects portrayed as both vulnerable and disorderly yet reformable. This project contextualises the centrality conferred by current scholarship to the Australian ‘Protectorates of Aborigines’ within a wider spatial network including other colonial jurisdictions. Special attention is devoted, on the one hand, to the Aboriginal Protectorate in Western Australia and, on the other, to the least studied type of Protectorates, those of Emigrants/Immigrants in British Malaya.
The project complements this trans-colonial approach with a more traditional perspective juxtaposing the imperial policy of protection with earlier and contemporary plans to moralise the poor and labourers and maximise their industry in the British metropole. British philanthropy represents the second major focus of this project. The analysis of the British domestic charitable initiatives vis-à-vis the Protectorates established across the Empire sheds light on the global reach of a single, multi-layered rhetoric of protection and its legal and conceptual foundations.
The third focus of the research group is a widely debated topic within the context of imperial protective policies: the testimonial capacity of Indigenous and colonised individuals across the Empire. The 19th century witnessed intense reflection around the issue of judicial evidence alongside novel discoveries in the fields of medical jurisprudence and the forensic sciences. From a methodological perspective, a similar interplay between ‘testimonial’ accounts and ‘evidentiary’ proofs also characterised the historian’s craft, which was undergoing a process of professionalisation and scientisation during the same period. This project seeks to investigate how notions of testimony and evidence developed within the legal field to be subsequently adopted by the historical method, and how they changed in the translation process. The research also seeks to explore how the construction of the colonised by lawyers, historians and imperial administrators was constitutive of the development of history as an academic discipline in 19th-century Europe. This part of the project links the interests of British imperial history with the preoccupations of the theory of history and the history of historiography.
This Max Planck Partner Group between the University of Bologna, founded in 1088 around the teaching of Roman law and arguably representing the cradle of European legal history, and the mpilhlt’s Department ‘European and Comparative Legal History’, with its focus on ‘legal transfer in the common law world’, represents the ideal framework for this project. The aim of the Partner Group is to encourage intense research cooperation between the two institutions through joint event organisation. Concrete, lasting outputs of this project will include research articles, one monograph by the Partner Group leader, and the first Italian translation and edition of a classic text in the history of political and legal thought: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity by the Victorian lawyer James Fitzjames Stephen, both a prominent theorist and draftsman of evidence law and an outspoken critic of philanthropy.