Page 14 The First Book of Moses: The Old Testament of the King James Version of the Bible
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Singh on Indian princely states and the Law of Nations
Prabhakar Singh (Jindal Global Law School) published the following article earlier this fall: "Indian Princely States and the 19th-century Transformation of the Law of Nations," Journal of International Dispute Settlement 11:3 (Sept. 2020), 365-87. Here's the abstract:
The role of the roughly 600 Indian princely kingdoms in the transformation of the law of nations into international law during the 19th century is an overlooked episode of international legal history. The Indian princely states effected a gradual end of the Mughal and the Maratha confederacies while appropriating international legal language. The Privy Council—before and after 1858—sanctified within common law as the acts of state, both, the seizure of territories from Indian kings and the ossification of encumbrances attached to the annexed territories. After the Crown takeover of the East India Company in 1858, the British India Government carefully rebooted, even mimicked, the native polyandric relationship of the tribal chiefs, petty states and semi-sovereigns with the Mughal–Maratha complex using multi-normative legal texts. Put down in the British stationery as engagements, sunnuds and treaties, these colonial texts projected an imperially layered nature of the native sovereignty. I challenge the metropole's claims of a one-way export to the colonies of the assumed normative surpluses. I argue that the periphery while responding to a ‘jurisdictional imperialism' upended international law's civilisation-giving thesis by exporting law to the metropole.
Further information is available here.
--Mitra Sharafi
More Than Just a Quiz Book
When is a quiz book not just a quiz book? When it’s so much more.
The 298-page volume, attractively formatted and illustrated, contains 105 quizzes and five crossword puzzles, covering among them all of the Canon, the world of Sherlock Holmes, Holmes on stage, screen, and television (with substantial attention to all the recent reworkings of the Great Detective), Sherlockian literature, and Arthur Conan Doyle.
Specific episodes of “BBC Sherlock” and “Elementary” are covered as well as all 60 Canonical tales.
Each of the quizzes is preceded by a short introduction. In the case of the ones for Canonical stories, I often found that they provided me with fresh insight into the background of the story’s writing even after the more than half of century I’ve been reading about the Agent.
Interspersed throughout are full-page and partial-page boxes headed TRIVIA FACTS: DID YOU KNOW THAT . . . . For example:
Conan Doyle may have conceived of the idea for his story “A Scandal in Bohemia” after his trip to Vienna in 1891. At that time all of Europe was in shock over the apparent double suicide of Austrian Archduke Rudolph and his mistress.
No, I didn’t know that!
If you only have room for one quiz book on your shelves, I recommend this one.
Richard Polenberg (1937-2020)
Richard Polenberg, the Marie Underhill Noll Professor of History Emeritus at Cornell University and the author of Fighting Faiths: The Abrams Case, the Supreme Court and Free Speech and many other works, has died. Here is Cornell's notice.