Development and the Rule of Law: Global Scripts, Vernacular Worlds

A potent genealogy of the contemporary global can be found in law and development discourse.  Its US-centered master narrative begins with aid to newly independent "Third World" states in the 1950s/60s, shifts to the neoliberal "Washington Consensus" of the 1980s/90s, and culminates in the more recent discourse of governance development with "the rule of law" as its very ground. Legal scholars have focused on a move from state-based public law to market-based private law models directed at fortifying contract.  But they have been less interested in thinking of law more broadly, as a powerful medium that maps the globe, societies and social relations as markets and in so doing, delineates regimes and degrees of formal legality and civilizational order.  To contemplate this process, I consider law at its most expansive, from sovereign speech-act to on-the-ground vernacular normative order, elaborating on my work on colonial and economic genealogies of liberal governance.   As I've argued, colonial contexts foreground the key role of law in the making of that modern object of governance that we call "the economy," which now, more than ever, stands in for "the public" in liberal democracies.  As such, I contemplate law beyond the state/market distinction and extend the genealogy of law and development doctrine back to British colonial liberalism in India, posing it as ancestor of liberal state-based developmentalism, neoliberal projects and contemporary 'rule of law' discourses.  In India, colonial market governance coded vernacular capitalists and their market practices, on which colonial economy relied, as the anachronistic acting out of "tradition" or "culture." With this in mind, I also pose law on markets as terrain to consider the politics of the global/local distinction, its history in colonial legal pluralism, and law and economy as global scripts confronted, appropriated and translated by what I call vernacular worlds.