SLR Reading Circle | ‘Trials of Sovereignty’ by Alastair McClure

NLSIU’s Socio-Legal Review (SLR), an open-access, student-run journal, is organising the second iteration of the SLR Reading Circle. This trimester, through the course of four sessions, we will be closely reading and engaging with Alastair McClure’s recent book, ‘Trials of Sovereignty: Mercy, Violence, and the Making of Criminal Law in British India, 1857–1922.’

Sessions

Session 1: August 13, 2025
Speaker: Dr. Samyak Ghosh, Assistant Professor, Social Science, NLSIU
This session will dive deep into chapter 1 of the book

Session 2: August 20, 2025
Speaker: Dr. Mrinal Satish, Professor of Law & Dean – Research, NLSIU
This session will focus on chapter 3 of the book

Session 3: September 3, 2025
Speaker: Kunal Ambasta, Assistant Professor of Law, NLSIU
This session will reflect on chapter 5 of the book

Session 4: September 10, 2025
Speaker: Alastair McClure, Assistant Professor, Department of History, The University of Hong Kong
This session will be held virtually to discuss the book generally, with a specific focus on the introduction

About the Book

‘Trials of Sovereignty’ offers the first legal history of mercy and discretion in nineteenth and twentieth-century India. Through a study of large-scale amnesties, the prerogative powers of pardon, executive commutation, and judicial sentencing practices, Alastair McClure argues that discretion represented a vital facet of colonial rule. In a bloody penal order, officials and judges consistently offered reduced sentences and pardons for select subjects, encouraging others to approach state institutions and confer the colonial state with greater legitimacy. Mercy was always a contested expression of sovereign power that risked exposing colonial weakness. This vulnerability was gradually recognized by colonial subjects who deployed a range of legal and political strategies to interrogate state power and question the lofty promises of British colonial justice. By the early twentieth century, the decision to break the law and reject imperial overtures of mercy had developed into a crucial expression of anticolonial politics.

About the Author

Alastair McClure is a legal historian of modern South Asia and the British Empire with research interests that focus largely on the history of criminal law and state violence. His most recent publications have included studies of courtroom archives, corporal punishment, capital punishment, and censorship. This research has been supported by grants from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the British Academy, and the University Grants Council, Hong Kong. Before joining the University of Hong Kong, he completed postdoctoral fellowships at McGill University and the University of Chicago. Between September to December of 2023 he was an ICAS:MP research fellow based in New Delhi. He also acts as the co-convenor of the Asian Legal History Seminar Series, hosted by the Department of History and the Faculty of Law, and is an associate editor for Law and History Review.

About SLR Reading Circle

This initiative attempts to explore the law as a lived, contested, and evolving institution—one that is shaped by and shapes a range of social, cultural, political, and economic forces. These sessions seek to not only foreground law’s multiple meanings but also questions of method and discipline.