Abstract
The following article is an attempt to contribute to an understanding of sovereignty in late eighteenth-century Britain and British India by examining the role of the King in his sovereign authorization of the East India Company. This sovereign authorization is illustrated through a study of the articulation of two elements from within the King’s prerogative in Britain between the 1750s and the 1770s as it applied to the East India Company: (a) the authority to sanction prize money, itself derived from the war and peace making authority of the King and (b) the authority to set up the ‘King’s Bench’, that is, the Supreme Court in 1773, where the King is virtually present and from which supreme juridical writs may be issued. In measuring the nature and scope of the King’s sovereignty, the article hopes to further the understanding of empire and its adumbrations in the Age of Enlightenment. It does so by arguing, on the one hand, that the conquests of the subcontinent will have to be related directly to a conceptualization of the King’s sovereignty, specifically the laws of prize; on the other hand, what is broadly seen as ‘custom’ cannot be understood outside the constituting ambit of sovereignty, that is, that by which laws are authorized. The specific implications of this for the development of laws in the subcontinent are sketched out.
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