Rahul Govind. The King’s Plunder, The King’s Bodies. Prize Laws, the British Empire and the Modern Legal Order Tulika Books [etc.], New Delhi [etc.] 2023. xii, 348 pp. $50.00; £42.00.
Year: 2025
Type: book-review
Abstract: This highly rewarding book stands at an obvious distance from the topics that typically comprise the history of work and labour relations.For the attentive reader, however, it will illuminate otherwise easily missed paths by which legal-institutional and intellectual history intersect with the more marked social, cultural, and political currents that have formed the context for the making and remaking of global labour history.Even for the more casual if still critical reader, the distance should be traversed easily enough given the recognizable genre of insight its author works within: of untangling the strands of modernity's myth making, especially around the development of its own supposedly key attributes, through demonstrating the obscured or, as Govind puts it, "mask[ed]" (p.327), particularities of colonial encounter through which they emerged.Here, it is the untangling of Western juridico-political modernity's narrative around the rise of parliamentary sovereignty (with its allied notions of jurisdiction and propertied subjecthood) and the particularities of British colonialism's pre-twentieth-century encounter with the South Asian subcontinent that are at hand.For those familiar with the historiography of Western legal and political thought, Govind's focus will be at least partly predictable from his title, a clever nod to German historian Ernst Kantorowicz's canonical 1957 work, The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology.Of course, Kantorowicz's own title is not merely a rhetorical flourish, but refers to a doctrine developed by centralizing monarchs in medieval Europe: the idea that the king possessed not only a mortal, physical body, but also an immortal one unbound by time.It was through this immortal body that the king exercised a sovereignty that was not simply personal but preternatural, persisting through each successive occupant of the throne.Systematic, yet plainly out of keeping with the theory-cum-liberal hagiography of representative democracy, this understanding of sovereignty, Govind contends, did not just disappear with the protracted advent of representative parliamentary bodies and the expansion of commercial society.As he puts it in the book's conclusion, this study of empire is an investigation of justice and jurisdiction, its stage as much as its masking.In this narrative, an economic history of trade is exposed as a determined militarized-legal practice of war and subjugation, which several historians have seen as an age of sociable commerce and roaring liberty keeping at bay a 'night watchman state.' In contrast, this work has described the political ecology in terms of a fierce maritime regulation ineluctably leading to military domination, from Prize laws to monopolization and military conquest (p.327).
Author: Faisal Chaudhry
Institution: University of Massachusetts System
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4411529395