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Imperial Metaphors and Native Savagery: Law’s Imagery, Crime and Empire

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Abstract

For all of law’s emphasis on its originary claims, this article argues that modern law has always been heavily dependent on categories and a set of images and metaphors for constituting identities. The presence of a racialised Other in the written, verbal and visual form all reveal striking parallels in the metaphorical forms used in the categorisation of people in temporality. In essence, law’s commitment to principles of universality and equality, is practically sustained only by the reinvented and rationalized exclusions of racial particularity, and hierarchies of otherness, which are variously exotic, dangerous and irredeemable. What is clear from this binary division is that the processes of criminalizing the unruly heathens, the wayward savages and the lower strata in the early nineteenth century, was part of a process of knowledge production which drew heavily upon key images of morality and of pathology. Such a stratum, as in the parallel process in the colonies amongst the criminal savages, was anxiously understood through a proliferation of stereotypes and labels imbued with this threatening menace. This article further explores how this imagery was policed and disciplined, and also opens up the possibility to assess how these images impart the same mythic forces in the ongoing acts of violence and specters of postcolonial imperialism that persist in its new global forms. This article aims, to reveal that legal forms and identities, far from being stable in their construction, are inherently unstable, and remain forever in an ambivalent relationship to the things being constructed and those engaged in the construction.

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Notes

  1. See Mayhew (1861, p. 68). Comparison between the metropolitan ‘criminal’ class and the ‘criminal’ tribes is a key feature of the discourse of the explorers of outcast London; again see, for example, Booth (1889, p. 41). ‘The hereditary criminal is by no means confined to India, although it is only in that country that they have the engaging simplicity to describe themselves frankly in the census’.

  2. See Thomas (1990, p. 226).

  3. See Rowe (1881), especially Chap. 1, ‘Saturday Night at the East End’ available at http://www.victorianlondon.org/publications/lifein.htm [accessed February 2010].

  4. Dickens unfinished 1870 story (Dickens 1974). See also London by Gaslight for a detailed description of the opium dens. However, 2 years later the Governor of the Stranger’s Home claims they have now all disappeared thanks to the work of his staff, see letter to The Times, Oct 28, 1872.

  5. See Doyle (2001, p. 63). Also see Ballew (1990). ‘The rascally lascar was a man, vital to the beggar’s plan.’

  6. See De Quincey and Morrison (2006, p. 100).

  7. See Said (1979).

  8. See Nijhar (2006).

  9. See Weiner (1991, p. 46).

  10. See Linebaugh and Redikar (2000), Fisher (2004).

  11. Quoted in Thome (1997).

  12. See Storch (1976).

  13. Mayhew claimed that the dangerous class consisted of some 30.000, denizens of the rookeries, apart from a wandering population of vagrants. However, the numbers are as elusive as the concept. One authority provides the figure for the mid-1850s of the total criminal class as “Known thieves and depredators, 22,959, receivers of stolen goods 3,095, prostitutes 27,186, suspected persons 29,468, vagrants and tramps 32,938, making a total of 122,646.” Greenwood (1869), Chap. XI.

  14. See Booth (1889, p. 39) as cited in Marriot and Matsmurra (1999, p. 49). Typical of the classification system was Booth’s notion of a ‘criminal’ class. However, unlike in India, the classification system remained largely in the realms of popular discourse rather than in official legislation.

  15. Quoted in Emsley (2005).

  16. See Mayhew (1861, p. 320).

  17. Ibid, p. 87.

  18. See Miller (1999).

  19. See Davis (1991).

  20. See J. Turton’s account of the Irish as part of the criminal class drawing on Mayhew, in Swift and Gilley (1999).

  21. See Davis (1991, p. 69).

  22. See Engels (1887). For a partisan missionary view of the Irish lower class in London, see Garwood (1853), especially Chap. 5.

  23. See Salter (1886).

  24. See W. T. Stead, the Victorian publisher, journalist and exposer of the underlife of the rookeries, especially young female prostitution as discussed in Walkowitz (1980).

  25. See Salter (1886, p. 39).

  26. See Emsley (1987, p. 60).

  27. See London (1995, p. 234).

  28. See Weiner (1991, p. 23).

  29. Ibid. p. 87.

  30. See Leps (1994).

  31. See Weiner (1991, p. 5).

  32. See Hobsbawm (1972).

  33. See Tobias (1967).

  34. The Suppression of Vagrancy, The Times, 20 October 1870.

  35. See Davis (1991, p. 76).

  36. See Hobsbawm (1989, p. 35).

  37. For example the Town Police Clauses Act 1848, a system of preventative professional policing. See Gattrell (1990).

  38. See Hennock (1987).

  39. See Nijhar (2006, p. 338).

  40. See Gilling (1997, p. 109).

  41. See Radzinowicz (1997).

  42. See Beccaria (1963).

  43. See Bentham (1970).

  44. See Garland (1985, p. 238).

  45. This was most obvious in Booth’s plans for convict settlements in the Salvation Army’s industrial farms.

  46. See Brogden (1982).

  47. The treatment model consisted of preventative as well as therapeutic and surgical operations based on the notion that society would consistently need those remedies.

  48. See, for example, the discussions on the penal system in Garland (1985, 1991).

  49. See the Gladstone Repor, 1895 in Weiner (1991, p. 34).

  50. See Nijhar (2006, p. 341).

  51. See Beccaria (1963, p. 13).

  52. See Timmons (1987, p. 102).

  53. Ibid, p. 106.

  54. Ibid, p. 104.

  55. See Beccaria (1963, p. 41).

  56. See Mayhew (1861, p. 76).

  57. Social discipline would be produced not just through direct control or punishment but also through social intervention.

  58. ‘Lascar Papers’, Home Miscellaneous series, 501, Vol. 1, fos 69–75, B, p. 38.

  59. See Hay (1975); and Phillips and Storch (1994) for details of the previous policing system.

  60. As supported later through the new stop-and-search powers in the Town Police Clauses Act 1848.

  61. See Weiner (1991, p. 215).

  62. See P. Colquhoun as quoted in Phillips (1980, p. 1).

  63. See Weiner (1991, p. 87).

  64. See Gattrell (1990).

  65. See Phillips and Storch (1994, p. 38).

  66. See Davies (1990).

  67. See Greg (1869) as quoted in Petrow (1994, p. 101).

  68. See Said (1979, p. 332).

  69. Ibid, p. 57.

  70. See Mayhew (1861, p. 67) as well as Mayhew and Binny (1862).

  71. See Devlin (1960).

  72. See Greenwood, Seven Curses, chapter xi.

  73. See Petrow (1994, p. 81).

  74. See Lea (1981, p. 67).

  75. See McConville (1981, p. 25).

  76. See W. D. Morrison (1891) as quoted in Tobias (1967, p. 57).

  77. Quoted in Weiner (1991, pp. 232–233).

  78. See Bartrip (1991).

  79. See Gatrell (1990), Gattrell (1994).

  80. For an examination of the records from Sussex and London, see Rude (1964, p. 12).

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  1. Centre for Criminology and Criminal Justice, Bangor University, Bangor, LL57 2DG, UK

    Preeti Nijhar

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Nijhar, P. Imperial Metaphors and Native Savagery: Law’s Imagery, Crime and Empire. Liverpool Law Rev 30, 189–205 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10991-010-9067-8

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