Unfinished Conquest: Residual Sovereignty and the Legal Foundations of the British Empire in India

Abstract

In this commentary I propose that European empires of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were largely unable to produce a consistent and self-contained theory of legal sovereignty. Considering the British imperial expansion in India as an illustrative case, I argue that military exploits and territorial gains were validated through the implicit idea of residual sovereignty and notion of unfinished conquest. Treaties signed with subjugated native powers under the aegis of the English East India Company later diplomatic negotiations of the British Raj with Indian princely states had no clear constitutional precedent or long-term outcome, leaving largely unresolved certain fundamental legal questions relating to conquest, sovereignty and imperial subjecthood.