From Law and Colonialism to Law and Globalization

The study of law's place in the colonial enterprise has finally come of age. The reissue of Martin Chanock's important study on law and colonialism in Africa is an opportune moment to reflect on the emergence of this field of scholarship over the 15 years since its publication. His richly detailed, innovative study of the making of customary law showed for the first time the centrality of law to the colonial process, tracing how it emerged out of intersections among British officials, African chiefs, Christian missionaries, urban migrants, and rural villagers. Law and colonialism is now a mature field with a rich variety of detailed case studies and a sophisticated theoretical understanding of the nature of customary law, the dynamics of legal pluralism, and the kinds of transformations that the legal transplants of colonialism engender. This is no longer understood as a simple process of imposition of law: instead there are spaces of resistance, struggles among colonizers, and forms of accommodation by colonized elites. Although this process was fundamentally one of transforming the colonized society to conform to that of the colonizer, all the while extracting labor, land, and mineral resources, it was never complete. Nor was it completely successful. The effort transformed the society at home as well as in the colony. It is continuing to do so as the former colonized now take up homes in the metropole.