CfP: Law on the Margins of Empire: Pluralism and Politics in Colonial Peripheries2026.5.2 {en}
Law on the Margins of Empire: Pluralism and Politics in Colonial Peripheries
Venue: Trinity College, University of Cambridge, CB2 1TQ, United Kingdom (in-person/virtually)
Date: 19–20 March 2027
Description: Historians have long turned to purportedly “peripheral” places to track the making of colonial law. From accounts of “small wars” to reflections on oceanic commerce, subaltern actors, and “dead-end scandals,” scholars have illuminated how law looked and acted differently from the deck of a dhow or a colonial officer’s field-tent. In these narratives, law emerges from negotiations across jurisdictional divides, both within the state and beyond.
Building on these insights, this workshop asks what constituted law and legal change on the geographic, temporal, epistemic, economic, social, and religious margins of early-modern and modern empires, both European and otherwise. It primarily seeks to explore whether and how the expansion of these empires failed to subsume or subordinate many of the institutional practices of Asian, African, and other indigenous actors. These actors continued to operate alongside and against imperial projects, shaping local and global politics, economic networks, and (trans)imperial reforms. Moving beyond traditional scholarly binaries, including colonial/indigenous, terrestrial/oceanic, religious/secular, and positive/customary, the workshop seeks to develop new conceptual paradigms that better accommodate (trans)local practices. It thereby questions popular assumptions about the consolidation of law in colonial spaces and encourages investigations into multidirectional processes of change and multifaceted legal landscapes.
The workshop focuses on Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Oceania. The historiography of law and empire looks different in each of these places. In part, this is due to a chronological disconnect: imperial expansion (and decolonization) occurred earlier in Latin America and Asia than in Africa and Oceania. But the contours of these diverse literatures are also influenced by their source bases, the different colonial powers at play, and the regions’ heterogeneous social, religious, and cultural landscapes. This workshop offers a unique opportunity for scholars across these fields to speak to one another about the differences, convergencies, and new ways of thinking about law and empire.
We are delighted that Professor Thomas Duve (Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory) and Professor Fahad Ahmad Bishara (University of Virginia) will give keynote addresses at the event.
This is an open call for papers. We invite contributions from scholars at all career stages that interpret “law” and “margins” in the broadest possible sense, and we encourage work that challenges the traditional definitions and uses of these terms. We welcome comparative, transregional, and oceanic approaches as well as projects that focus on individual locales. Paper proposals might address one or more of the following questions:
- What did “law” look like in “peripheral,” “marginal,” or “backwater” regions of empires?
- How do we understand the legal vernaculars of indigenous actors vis-à-vis their encounters with colonial law?
- Did subaltern practitioners speak and invoke specific languages of law? What methods (historical or otherwise) can we adopt to accommodate them?
- How does looking at the margins of empires alter our views of the consolidation and despotism of imperial law?
- Was colonial reform limited, defeated, or defied by “customs” in the margins?
- How did diverse historical actors respond to strategies deployed by colonial powers to manage “legal pluralism” across time and geography?
- Did the discourse and practice of law in the margins contradict one another? If so, how did quotidian practices push the discursive boundaries of law to provoke innovations in legal and/or political thought? Are there particular moments when these contradictions became especially visible?
- How does comparing the colonial peripheries of Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Oceania reformulate scholarly theorizations of law and empire?
Funding:
Thanks to the generous support of Trinity College, Cambridge, limited funds are available to reimburse travel expenses. Scholars at any career stage may request reimbursement; however, priority will be given to those based at institutions outside Europe and North America, advanced Ph.D. students, postdocs, and non-tenure-track faculty. Accommodation and meals will be provided for all participants. Unfortunately, we cannot reimburse visa expenses or provide guidance on visa applications.
Publication:
We intend to publish a selection of the workshop papers as a journal special issue. Please do not propose papers promised for publication, under review, or already published elsewhere.
Application Instructions:
Please submit the following to lawonthemargins2027[at]gmail.com by 10 August 2026 in a single PDF or Word document:
- Paper title and abstract (200-300 words);
- Short bio (50-150 words);
- A brief statement indicating whether you would prefer to attend in-person or virtually.
- A brief statement indicating if you would require reimbursement for travel costs and, if yes, an estimate of those expenses.
Decisions will be communicated by 1 October 2026. Participants will be asked to circulate short papers (4,000-6,000 words, including notes) by 1 March 2027.
Applications may be submitted in English, French, Spanish, or Portuguese, but the final workshop paper must be written and presented in English.
Organizers & Contact Information:
Dr. Wallace Teska
Trinity College, Cambridge
Dr. Saumyashree Ghosh
Yale Law School and Krea University
Dr. Silvia Escanilla Huerta
University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Email: lawonthemargins2027[at]gmail.com
Source: CFP: Law on the Margins of Empire: Pluralism and Politics in Colonial Peripheries (March 19–20, 2027, Trinity College, University of Cambridge, UK), H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online, licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 US.
