Date:
Location:
To attend in person, please register here
How the Indian Penal Code Came to Canada: Law, Religion, and the Global Lives of Empire
J. Barton Scott, Associate Professor of Historical Studies and the Study of Religion, University of Toronto
In 1892, the Canadian government enacted a new criminal code. Driven by settler-public opinion in the years after the Northwest Métis Rebellion, this modernizing document consolidated criminal law nationally, serving as a means of consolidating Ottawa’s rule over its colonial hinterland. The new code was also part of a much larger imperial assemblage—one that spanned the world. Adapted from an 1877 English criminal code that was in turn based on the 1837 Indian Penal Code (a text with a diffusely transnational history stretching from Louisiana to Guatemala), the 1892 Canadian Criminal Code soon prompted Australia and New Zealand to create codes of their own in the mid-1890s.
This presentation takes this tangle of transnational connections as an occasion for asking whether settler-colonialism within Canada might be productively studied from within an interactional or contrapuntal history of empire, with particular attention to British India. By attending more closely to the global circulation of British-imperial forms of governance, might we come to a more textured understanding of settler-colonialism in North America? How did religion in particular serve as both an object and an idiom of colonial governance—simultaneously a means of marking populations and territories and of articulating projects of legal and moral subject formation?
J. Barton Scott is Associate Professor of Historical Studies and the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Spiritual Despots: Modern Hinduism and the Genealogies of Self-Rule and Slandering the Sacred: Blasphemy Law and Religious Affect in Colonial India, both published with University of Chicago Press.