Imperial Incarceration

Detention without Trial in the Making of British Colonial Africa

Michael Lobban

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781316519127
• eBook ISBN: 9781009020497
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

For nineteenth-century Britons, the rule of law stood at the heart of their constitutional culture, and guaranteed the right not to be imprisoned without trial. At the same time, in an expanding empire, the authorities made frequent resort to detention without trial to remove political leaders who stood in the way of imperial expansion. Such conduct raised difficult questions about Britain's commitment to the rule of law. Was it satisfied if the sovereign validated acts of naked power by legislative forms, or could imperial subjects claim the protection of Magna Carta and the common law tradition? In this pathbreaking book, Michael Lobban explores how these matters were debated from the liberal Cape, to the jurisdictional borderlands of West Africa, to the occupied territory of Egypt, and shows how and when the demands of power undermined the rule of law. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• List of Maps
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations of Archival Sources
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Martial Law and the Rule of Law in the Eastern Cape, 1830–1880
• 3 Zulu Political Prisoners, 1872–1897
• 4 Egypt and Sudan, 1882–1887
• 5 Detention without Trial in Sierra Leoneand the Gold Coast, 1865–1890
• 6 Removing Rulers in the Niger Delta, 1887–1897
• 7 Consolidating Colonial Rule: Detentions in the Gold Coast and Sierra Leone, 1896–1901
• 8 Detention Comes to Court: African Appeals to the Courts in Whitehall and Westminster, 1895–1922
• 9 Martial Law in the Anglo-Boer War, 1899–1902
• 10 Martial Law, the Privy Council and The Zulu Rebellion of 1906
• 11 Conclusion
• Index