The interplay of disciplines: law and history
Legal colonial research throws up a number of theoretical and methodological challenges, which are linked to the interplay of the disciplines involved. These have been discussed in detail and published elsewhere,[78] though certain points bear mentioning here.
Drawing on historical evidence is necessarily a constructive activity; the material is transformed into a coherent narrative with the intent to support the argument being advanced.[79] An author's predispositions, themselves the result of culture, background and circumstances, cannot be discounted, for they inevitably colour both the account and the analysis thereof.
A compounding factor is the Eurocentric emphasis in Western historiography, which not only assumes European superiority but renders it normative.[80]
It is submitted that awareness of these influences as well as contextualization are essential to a rigorous scholarly discourse on colonialism.
Christopher Tomlins suggests that Contextualist historiography does not preÂsent the best approach in illuminating our understanding of law, since “the conÂtemplated object is not enlivened by the relationalities within which it allegedly belongs, the relationalities of its time, but by the fold of time that creates it in constellation with the present, the moment of recognition.”[81] Thus, according to Tomlins, it is the present, rather than the past, which adds to the actual underÂstanding of historical phenomena. Tomlins highlights, here, historicism’s links to teleology, arguing that by fixing events and objects in the setting they occurred, their meaning becomes entirely dependent upon it, making their significance changeable according to context, thus rendering historicism “an antifoundational philosophy of history.”[82]
Whilst Tomlins’ critique of contextual history is helpful insofar as it liberates the scholar from an injunction to remain, at all moments, in the past, it is a criÂtique which arguably goes further than it needs.
The current project, it is admitÂted, takes as its starting point an enquiry that is animated by a contemporary field of reference (informed by an underlying ethical and political critique of colonialÂism), but in practice, its concern is not to impute to the agents and actors within the account a contemporary sensibility, but understand them in their own terms, by reference to the currents of thought pervading at the time. A further point to observe here is that the main danger may not be that of projecting the present on the past, but of an inability to shake off a past that may be seen to envelop the present. Indeed, it is the intuition that the past continues to structure and shape contemporary Mauritian society that is the main concern of this work.In a broad appraisal of colonial discourse theory, David Washbrook draws on Aijaz Ahmad’s work, who claims that critics of colonialism are in fact the main beneficiaries, and points out that most such theorists are residing in the West and not (or no longer) in the former colony.[83] Their motivation and portrayal of vicÂtimization is thus, he claims, linked to the political agenda of the West. This assessÂment may be correct to some extent, but it does not render the critique futile. It is submitted that the ability to observe and make value judgements requires a certain level of detachment, as well as exposure to differing circumstances, which act as contrast and by reference to which new conceptions are formed. Further, the ability to make such judgement, and more importantly, to vocalize it and have it heard, represents a privilege that is accorded by time and place. While a level of elitism is no doubt present, it does not render a discourse inherently illegitimate.
Washbrook’s assessment of colonial discourse critique is provoking, but falls foul of the very issues he highlights. He bemoans the common image of colonizÂers as reduced to “almost to the point of caricature,...
representatives of the manly, the civilized and the white.”[84] (In making that claim, he cites exclusively the work of well-known feminist scholars: Antoinette Burton, Anne McClintock and Mrinalini Sinha.) But in his own objections towards this school of thought, Washbrook draws an even more peculiar caricature: that of the colonizer as an impressionable foreigner who merely learns about power relations from the locals. He makes the following observation:Colonial rule was often thinly stretched and could scarcely have sustained itself without the “collaboration” of local power structures, whose relations of conflict and domination became incorporated into its own constructs. Again, such incorporation certainly reconfigured such structures. But it hardly reconstituted them entirely anew... The power relations of colonialÂism were inextricably bound up with the power relations between colonial subjects themselves.[85]
The “collaboration” of the colonized is an important element in the discourse on colonialism, and will be revisited in subsequent chapters. But as a general argument, it fails to address the question of how settlers exploited local power systems to their own advantage. The role played by colonizers themselves is miniÂmized, who in Washbrook’s paradigm are portrayed as merely perpetuating the status quo, rendering them essentially blameless.
This idea is thrown into sharp relief particularly in the context of Mauritius, which, when Britain took over, was populated by imported slaves and the previous colonists. The only cooperation that took place was extended from the British to the French, despite the latter being in the minority, because it was the only associÂation that was perceived to yield benefits to the new colonists. The precise nature of that relationship and how it evolved will be discussed in detail in the main body of this work, but it should be noted here that while colonial critique may be steeped in cliches, in dismantling those, arguments with apologist overtones should be avoided.
1.3