Leading scholars in the social sciences come together to consider the achievement of Sir Henry Maine.

A demonstration of the contemporary context and significance of Maine's approach to the law.

Sir Henry Maine died in 1888 and since then his ideas have been used by lawyers, historians, sociologists and many others. This is the first book to concentrate upon what he said about the law itself, and, as such, it explores the pioneering work Maine did in explaining law not by reference to abstract analysis but by placing it firmly in its social and historical context. Instead of concentrating on concepts such as sovereignty he looked at the realities of law as it was practised by professionals and experienced by laymen. The result was a controversial achievement stressing the reforming duties of jurists and citizens at times of social change. This is neither a conventional biography nor an abstract analysis of Maine's thought, but a demonstration of the contemporary context and significance of his views.

Define and Rule focuses on the turn in late nineteenth-century colonial statecraft when Britain abandoned the attempt to eradicate difference between conqueror and conquered and introduced a new idea of governance, as the definition and management of difference. Mahmood Mamdani explores how lines were drawn between settler and native as distinct political identities, and between natives according to tribe. Out of that colonial experience issued a modern language of pluralism and difference. A mid-nineteenth-century crisis of empire attracted the attention of British intellectuals and led to a reconception of the colonial mission, and to reforms in India, British Malaya, and the Dutch East Indies. The new politics, inspired by Sir Henry Maine, established that natives were bound by geography and custom, rather than history and law, and made this the basis of administrative practice. Maine’s theories were later translated into “native administration” in the African colonies. Mamdani takes the case of Sudan to demonstrate how colonial law established tribal identity as the basis for determining access to land and political power, and follows this law’s legacy to contemporary Darfur. He considers the intellectual and political dimensions of African movements toward decolonization by focusing on two key figures: the Nigerian historian Yusuf Bala Usman, who argued for an alternative to colonial historiography, and Tanzania’s first president, Mwalimu Julius Nyerere, who realized that colonialism’s political logic was legal and administrative, not military, and could be dismantled through nonviolent reforms.