History in the Making: Trials of Sovereignty Mercy, Violence, and the Making of Criminal Law in British India, 1857–1922″, Alastair McClure (HKU)

Trials of Sovereignty offers the first legal history of mercy and discretion in nineteenth and twentieth-century India. Through a study of large-scale amnesties, the prerogative powers of pardon, executive commutation, and judicial sentencing practices, Alastair McClure argues that discretion represented a vital facet of colonial rule. In a bloody penal order, officials and judges consistently offered reduced sentences and pardons for select subjects, encouraging others to approach state institutions and confer the colonial state with greater legitimacy. Mercy was always a contested expression of sovereign power that risked exposing colonial weakness. This vulnerability was gradually recognized by colonial subjects who deployed a range of legal and political strategies to interrogate state power and question the lofty promises of British colonial justice. By the early twentieth century, the decision to break the law and reject imperial overtures of mercy had developed into a crucial expression of anticolonial politics.

Alastair McClure is a legal historian of modern South Asia and the British Empire. His recent research has focused on histories of criminal law and state violence, including studies of capital punishment, corporeal punishment and courtroom archives. He acts as the co-convenor of the Asian Legal History Seminar Series, hosted by the Department of History and the Faculty of Law, and is an associate editor for Law and History Review. His first book, Trials of Sovereignty: Mercy, Terror and the Making of Criminal Law in British India, 1857-1922 was published in 2024 with Studies in Legal History, Cambridge University Press. This book offers the first detailed study of the role played by mercy and discretionary justice in the construction of India’s modern political and legal order in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

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