Introduction: Histories

Abstract

The flowering of scholarship on legal pluralism and its relation to histories of colonization and imperialism has tended to highlight one kind of violence, that of the colonizer against the indigene. Leading studies of the colonialist foundations of contemporary states have focused on crucial questions of the constitutive role of legal relations in the conscription of labour, or the transformation of households and familial and personal identities, or the subordination of ‘native law’ within a colonial governance regime. They have been less concerned to address the troubling subject of violence within and between the subordinated and incorporated communities and peoples of colonial and post-..