Governing Frontiers: Martial Law and Jurisdiction in Early Nineteenth-Century Madras

This paper considers the place of extraordinary jurisdiction in extending the authority of the early colonial state in South India. It uses the official correspondence on the suspension of law in Madras Presidency to ask: How did counter-insurgency campaigns expand and consolidate the early colonial state’s jurisdiction? In the Madras frontier, ethnographic landscapes frequently provided the justification for the suspension of ordinary law. And in the settled regions of the Presidency, exceptional intervention was invoked to subject rebels and insurgents to exemplary punishment by widening the ambit of special trials and custody. The paper argues that these exceptional interventions–the invocation of martial law, the manner of apprehending suspects, and the trial of offences against the state through court martial and special commissions—legitimated by arguments of necessity or improvement and made palatable to metropolitan liberals, form a field of counter-insurgent practices that are seemingly ad-hoc, but which, in fact, reveal how the early colonial state systematically accrued authority from executive discretion.  In a regime of conquest that sought to build moral legitimacy through the rule of law, how did expanding executive discretion facilitate the consolidation of jurisdictional boundaries and military pacification?