Jurisprudence and Nationalism in the British Empire in the Early Twentieth Century: India, Egypt, and Palestine Compared

Abstract This article discusses works on jurisprudence produced by authors from three British-ruled territories (India, Egypt and Palestine) in the early decades of the twentieth century. It argues that these works were part of a non-Western jurisprudential wave that appeared in different parts of the British Empire at the time. Legal scholars working in these territories were not passive recipients of legal ideas imported from the metropole: their works were more cosmopolitan than those produced in the United Kingdom, using ideas drawn from English thinkers but also referring to Continental and American historical and sociological theories of law. The use of such theories was combined with an interest in the ideas and values of local religious legal systems (Hindu law, Islamic law and Jewish law, respectively). These systems were depicted as superior to Western law—not only because local legal scholars saw them as the historical source of Western jurisprudential conceptions but also because they were viewed as a possible source of collectivist values that would replace the individualist values of transplanted Western law. While there were many similarities between the works written in the three territories, the article also highlights certain differences in the way religious legal systems were viewed in the places examined.