Book Talk: Sovereignty, International Law, and the Princely States of Colonial South Asia

What constitutes a sovereign state in the international legal sphere? This question has been central to international law for centuries. In this talk, I will explore the history of sovereignty through an analysis of jurisdictional politics involving the princely states of colonial South Asia, which were ruled by local rulers and were not considered to be British territory. Instead, they remained subject to British influence exercised through political officers, resulting in enduring controversies over whether they were sovereign states. I will trace how the language of sovereignty became the discourse for debating the legal status of the princely states and, in this way, mediated the exercise of political power in colonial South Asia. Focusing on the period between the mid-eighteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, I will examine how international lawyers, British politicians, colonial officials, rulers and bureaucrats of princely states, and anticolonial nationalists continually redefined the concept of sovereignty. Assertions of sovereignty enabled these players to rely on the vocabulary of international law to resolve questions of legal status, the extent of rights, and the proper exercise of powers, and to construct a political order that was in line with their interests and aspirations. By invoking the vernacular of sovereignty in contrasting ways to support their differing visions of world order, these actors also attempted to reconfigure the boundaries among the spheres of the national, the imperial, and the international. Exploring the disputes and debates over the princely states is, therefore, key to understanding the history of sovereignty, the construction of the modern Indian nation-state, and the scope and stakes of international law itself.

Priyasha Saksena is Associate Professor at the School of Law, University of Leeds. She joined the School of Law in March 2019. She is a graduate of Harvard University (SJD) and National Law School of India University (BA LLB). Prior to joining the University of Leeds, She was a visiting researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory. She also has experience in private practice, having been an associate at a corporate law firm.