Lisa Ford - Profile on Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Books by Lisa Ford

The King's Peace: Law and Order in the British Empire (Harvard 2021)

Lauren Benton and Lisa Ford, Rage for Order: The British Empire and the Origins of International Law, 1800-1850 (Harvard 2016)

International law burst on the scene as a new field in the late nineteenth century. Where did it ... more International law burst on the scene as a new field in the late nineteenth century. Where did it come from? Rage for Order finds the origins of international law in empires—especially in the British Empire’s sprawling efforts to refashion the imperial constitution and use it to order the world in the early part of that century.

Lauren Benton and Lisa Ford uncover the lost history of Britain’s global empire of law in colonial conflicts and bureaucratic dispatches rather than legal treatises and case law. Tracing constitutional politics around the world, Rage for Order shows that attempts to refashion the British imperial constitution touched on all the controversial issues of the day, from slavery to revolution. Scandals in turbulent colonies targeted petty despots and augmented the power of the Crown to intervene in the administration of justice. Campaigns to police piracy and slave trading linked British interests to the stability of politically fragmented regions. Dull bureaucrats dominated legal reform, but they did not act in isolation. Indigenous peoples, slaves, convicts, merchants, and sailors all scrambled to play a part in reordering the empire and the world beyond it. Yet, through it all, legal reform focused on promoting order, not advancing human rights or charting liberalism.

Rage for Order maps a formative phase in world history when imperial, not international, law anchored visions of global order. This sweeping story changes the way we think about the legacy of the British Empire and the meaning of international law today.

Lisa Ford, Settler Sovereignty: Jurisdiction and Indigenous People in America and Australia (Harvard 2010).

In 'Settler Sovereignty', Lisa Ford argues that modern settler sovereignty emerged when settlers ... more In 'Settler Sovereignty', Lisa Ford argues that modern settler sovereignty emerged when settlers in North America and Australia defined indigenous theft and violence as crime.

This occurred, not at the moment of settlement or federation, but in the second quarter of the nineteenth century when notions of statehood, sovereignty, empire, and civilization were in rapid, global flux. Ford traces the emergence of modern settler sovereignty in everyday contests between settlers and indigenous people in early national Georgia and the colony of New South Wales. In both places before 1820, most settlers and indigenous people understood their conflicts as war, resolved disputes with diplomacy, and relied on shared notions like reciprocity and retaliation to address frontier theft and violence. This legal pluralism, however, was under stress as new, global statecraft linked sovereignty to the exercise of perfect territorial jurisdiction. In Georgia, New South Wales, and elsewhere, settler sovereignty emerged when, at the same time in history, settlers rejected legal pluralism and moved to control or remove indigenous peoples.

Between Indigenous and Settler Governance addresses the history, current development and future o... more Between Indigenous and Settler Governance addresses the history, current development and future of Indigenous self-governance in four settler-colonial nations: Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States. Bringing together emerging scholars and leaders in the field of indigenous law and legal history, this collection offers a long-term view of the legal, political and administrative relationships between Indigenous collectivities and nation-states. Placing historical contingency and complexity at the center of analysis, the papers collected here examine in detail the process by which settler states both dissolved indigenous jurisdictions and left spaces – often unwittingly – for indigenous survival and corporate recovery. They emphasise the promise and the limits of modern opportunities for indigenous self-governance; whilst showing how all the players in modern settler colonialism build on a shared and multifaceted past. Indigenous tradition is not the only source of the principles and practices of indigenous self-determination; the essays in this book explore some ways that the legal, philosophical and economic structures of settler colonial liberalism have shaped opportunities for indigenous autonomy. Between Indigenous and Settler Governance will interest all those concerned with Indigenous peoples in settler-colonial nations.

Papers by Lisa Ford

El Legado De La Justicia Colonial

Settlement and Dispossession

Cambridge University Press eBooks, Aug 18, 2022

1. A Global Empire of Law

4. The Promise of Protection

Expansion, 1820–50

Cambridge University Press eBooks, Nov 5, 2013

Empires and the Rule of Law: Arbitrary Justice and Imperial Legal Ordering

The Cambridge Companion to the Rule of Law, 2021

Inquiring into the Corpus of Empire

Journal of World History, 2021

This article tests the value of corpus linguistics in analysing nineteenth-century commissions of... more This article tests the value of corpus linguistics in analysing nineteenth-century commissions of inquiry into British colonies. It examines and improves the capacity of a computerised text analysis tool called the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count to identify word meaning, sentiment and psycholinguistic constructs in nineteenth-century sources. By augmenting its dictionary with nineteenth-century language and cross-checking meaning, we show that the software can code with 97% accuracy. We then demonstrate the tool’s potential to explore genres of colonial writing, and to locate emotive language and language relating to power differentials in commission reports, a function we argue may provide a ‘way in’ to assessing how commissioners treated different kinds of British subjects and their testimony in the reports

The Journal of Legal History, 2016

This article investigates the difficult interface between metropolitan legal reform and empire in... more This article investigates the difficult interface between metropolitan legal reform and empire in the late 1820s. In 1828, the Supreme Court of New South Wales sentenced dozens of men to death under legislation that had been repealed in Britain. It then insisted that every one of them be set free. This mess raised a fundamental question agitated in different ways around the empire in that decade: to what degree should colonial subjects enjoy the benefits of modernized metropolitan criminal law? Even as successive local and metropolitan Acts imposed new constraints on the civil rights of convicts in New South Wales, the Supreme Court insisted that even the most notorious recidivists in the colony should be protected against the Bloody Code from the moment it was reformed at home. In doing so, the court ignored the terms of section 1 of the Criminal Statutes Repeal Act passed at the request of a former East India Company officer to preserve the operation of the Code in India. Thus the peculiar reception controversy in New South Wales shows not only how disruptive metropolitan reform could be for colonies, it performed a growing racial gap in the imagination of legal subjecthood in different corners of empire.

Magistrates in Empire

Legal Pluralism and Empires, 1500-1850, 2013

Legal Change, Convict Activism and the Reform of Penal Relocation in Colonial New South Wales: The Port Macquarie Penal Settlement, 1822–26

Australian Historical Studies, 2015

This article investigates how imperial legal reforms and convict activism combined to challenge t... more This article investigates how imperial legal reforms and convict activism combined to challenge the expanding system of internal ‘removal’ and ‘transportation’ in New South Wales during the 1820s. In particular, it explores how prisoners at the Port Macquarie penal settlement disputed the legal foundations of sentencing by colonial magistrates, contributing to the closure of the settlement and a flurry of ameliorative legislation. This article also examines the limits of imperial legal reform in a distant colony. Remediation of the convict relocation system was impeded by bureaucratic intransigence and by the new emphasis on convict subordination in the aftermath of the 1819–21 Royal Commission of Inquiry into the state of the colony of New South Wales.

Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 2014

This paper uses a comprehensive survey of sentencing patterns and penal regulations to demonstrat... more This paper uses a comprehensive survey of sentencing patterns and penal regulations to demonstrate the collapse of internal transportation in the colony of New South Wales into a system of extra-penal labour. It argues that a combination of judicial exigencies, local regulations, and creative misinterpretations of metropolitan penal reform turned the penal outpost established at Newcastle in 1804 into an experiment of interest to local and metropolitan reformers -an experiment that was rolled out throughout New South Wales, its peripheries, and in selected outposts of the British Empire after 1820.

Aboriginal History Journal, 2016

Jack Chambers, co-owner of Eva Downs Station in the Northern Territory, had an argument with his ... more Jack Chambers, co-owner of Eva Downs Station in the Northern Territory, had an argument with his Aboriginal cook, Dolly Ross. That morning, Ross had refused to prepare breakfast for her fellow Aboriginal pastoral workers because she said she was ill. Chambers claimed that Dolly was malingering because she had quarrelled with her husband. After the argument, Dolly, her husband Jim and a minor named Munro left the station. Chambers claimed that he had ordered them off the property. The Ross family testified that they had left in protest when Chambers threatened to 'liven up' Dolly if she did not do her work. Later that morning, Jack Chambers, Colin Chambers, manager Jack Britt, and stockmen George Booth and Francis Booth rode out from the station either to muster cattle or to pursue the Ross family. Either motive was possible: there were cattle to be mustered and all hands were needed on deck. The two parties met on the road a kilometre from Eva Downs. Their stories about what happened next differ fundamentally. The Chambers brothers claimed that Dolly and her family blocked the road and aggressively brandished sticks and boomerangs. Dolly, Jim and Munro said that the Chambers party attempted to run them down and that they held up their swags to deflect the horses. Whatever occurred, their confrontation ended in Jim Ross's beating and the repeated horsewhipping of all three. They were then driven back towards the station. Just inside the homestead gate, the party was confronted by two Aboriginal stockmen, Isaac Isaacs and Dinny McDinny, who, by all accounts, had come to defend the Ross family against the violence of their employers. The Chambers brothers attested at trial, Isaac attempted to 'belt' Jack Chambers with an iron bar. George Booth then fired two revolver shots over their heads,

The Convict Peace: The Imperial Context of the 1833 Convict Revolt at Castle Forbes

The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 2020

This paper places a well-known controversy about the jurisdiction of nineteenth-century magistrat... more This paper places a well-known controversy about the jurisdiction of nineteenth-century magistrates in its imperial context. In particular it shows how and why conversations about convict management and the jurisdiction of magistrates in New South Wales were interwoven with contemporary conversations about the law and government of slavery. In 1833 in the aftermath of the Castle Forbes Revolt, convicts, administrators and magistrates in New South Wales borrowed the language of disorder and good governance from debates about the amelioration of slavery because those languages made sense of an experience that was both deeply local and shared. Convicts were not slaves; but masters, magistrates, convicts and slaves all experienced substantial shifts in the relations among empire, colonial states and local institutions of governance that redefined their privileges and obligations in the first decades of the nineteenth century. The contest between magistrate-masters and convicts in the af...

The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 2017

Narratives of the history of international law in the early and middle decades of the nineteenth ... more Narratives of the history of international law in the early and middle decades of the nineteenth century have emphasised the role of global humanitarian movements in establishing international norms and institutions. The abolition of the slave trade and the amelioration of slavery feature prominently in this account as reform movements that supposedly laid the groundwork for human rights law. Using controversy about the constitution of the island of Trinidad and the excesses of its first governor, Thomas Picton, as a case study, we argue instead that attempts to reform slavery formed part of a wider British effort to construct a coherent imperial legal system, a project that corresponded to a different, and at the time more powerful vision of global order. As experiment and anti-model, Trinidad's troubles provided critics with an advertisement for the necessity of robust imperial legal power in new and old colonies. Such a call for imperial oversight of colonial legal orders formed the basis of an empire-wide push to reorder the British world.

The King's Peace: Law and Order in the British Empire (Harvard 2021)

Lauren Benton and Lisa Ford, Rage for Order: The British Empire and the Origins of International Law, 1800-1850 (Harvard 2016)

International law burst on the scene as a new field in the late nineteenth century. Where did it ... more International law burst on the scene as a new field in the late nineteenth century. Where did it come from? Rage for Order finds the origins of international law in empires—especially in the British Empire’s sprawling efforts to refashion the imperial constitution and use it to order the world in the early part of that century.

Lauren Benton and Lisa Ford uncover the lost history of Britain’s global empire of law in colonial conflicts and bureaucratic dispatches rather than legal treatises and case law. Tracing constitutional politics around the world, Rage for Order shows that attempts to refashion the British imperial constitution touched on all the controversial issues of the day, from slavery to revolution. Scandals in turbulent colonies targeted petty despots and augmented the power of the Crown to intervene in the administration of justice. Campaigns to police piracy and slave trading linked British interests to the stability of politically fragmented regions. Dull bureaucrats dominated legal reform, but they did not act in isolation. Indigenous peoples, slaves, convicts, merchants, and sailors all scrambled to play a part in reordering the empire and the world beyond it. Yet, through it all, legal reform focused on promoting order, not advancing human rights or charting liberalism.

Rage for Order maps a formative phase in world history when imperial, not international, law anchored visions of global order. This sweeping story changes the way we think about the legacy of the British Empire and the meaning of international law today.

Lisa Ford, Settler Sovereignty: Jurisdiction and Indigenous People in America and Australia (Harvard 2010).

In 'Settler Sovereignty', Lisa Ford argues that modern settler sovereignty emerged when settlers ... more In 'Settler Sovereignty', Lisa Ford argues that modern settler sovereignty emerged when settlers in North America and Australia defined indigenous theft and violence as crime.

This occurred, not at the moment of settlement or federation, but in the second quarter of the nineteenth century when notions of statehood, sovereignty, empire, and civilization were in rapid, global flux. Ford traces the emergence of modern settler sovereignty in everyday contests between settlers and indigenous people in early national Georgia and the colony of New South Wales. In both places before 1820, most settlers and indigenous people understood their conflicts as war, resolved disputes with diplomacy, and relied on shared notions like reciprocity and retaliation to address frontier theft and violence. This legal pluralism, however, was under stress as new, global statecraft linked sovereignty to the exercise of perfect territorial jurisdiction. In Georgia, New South Wales, and elsewhere, settler sovereignty emerged when, at the same time in history, settlers rejected legal pluralism and moved to control or remove indigenous peoples.

Between Indigenous and Settler Governance addresses the history, current development and future o... more Between Indigenous and Settler Governance addresses the history, current development and future of Indigenous self-governance in four settler-colonial nations: Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States. Bringing together emerging scholars and leaders in the field of indigenous law and legal history, this collection offers a long-term view of the legal, political and administrative relationships between Indigenous collectivities and nation-states. Placing historical contingency and complexity at the center of analysis, the papers collected here examine in detail the process by which settler states both dissolved indigenous jurisdictions and left spaces – often unwittingly – for indigenous survival and corporate recovery. They emphasise the promise and the limits of modern opportunities for indigenous self-governance; whilst showing how all the players in modern settler colonialism build on a shared and multifaceted past. Indigenous tradition is not the only source of the principles and practices of indigenous self-determination; the essays in this book explore some ways that the legal, philosophical and economic structures of settler colonial liberalism have shaped opportunities for indigenous autonomy. Between Indigenous and Settler Governance will interest all those concerned with Indigenous peoples in settler-colonial nations.

El Legado De La Justicia Colonial

Settlement and Dispossession

Cambridge University Press eBooks, Aug 18, 2022

1. A Global Empire of Law

4. The Promise of Protection

Expansion, 1820–50

Cambridge University Press eBooks, Nov 5, 2013

Empires and the Rule of Law: Arbitrary Justice and Imperial Legal Ordering

The Cambridge Companion to the Rule of Law, 2021

Inquiring into the Corpus of Empire

Journal of World History, 2021

This article tests the value of corpus linguistics in analysing nineteenth-century commissions of... more This article tests the value of corpus linguistics in analysing nineteenth-century commissions of inquiry into British colonies. It examines and improves the capacity of a computerised text analysis tool called the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count to identify word meaning, sentiment and psycholinguistic constructs in nineteenth-century sources. By augmenting its dictionary with nineteenth-century language and cross-checking meaning, we show that the software can code with 97% accuracy. We then demonstrate the tool’s potential to explore genres of colonial writing, and to locate emotive language and language relating to power differentials in commission reports, a function we argue may provide a ‘way in’ to assessing how commissioners treated different kinds of British subjects and their testimony in the reports

The Journal of Legal History, 2016

This article investigates the difficult interface between metropolitan legal reform and empire in... more This article investigates the difficult interface between metropolitan legal reform and empire in the late 1820s. In 1828, the Supreme Court of New South Wales sentenced dozens of men to death under legislation that had been repealed in Britain. It then insisted that every one of them be set free. This mess raised a fundamental question agitated in different ways around the empire in that decade: to what degree should colonial subjects enjoy the benefits of modernized metropolitan criminal law? Even as successive local and metropolitan Acts imposed new constraints on the civil rights of convicts in New South Wales, the Supreme Court insisted that even the most notorious recidivists in the colony should be protected against the Bloody Code from the moment it was reformed at home. In doing so, the court ignored the terms of section 1 of the Criminal Statutes Repeal Act passed at the request of a former East India Company officer to preserve the operation of the Code in India. Thus the peculiar reception controversy in New South Wales shows not only how disruptive metropolitan reform could be for colonies, it performed a growing racial gap in the imagination of legal subjecthood in different corners of empire.

Magistrates in Empire

Legal Pluralism and Empires, 1500-1850, 2013

Legal Change, Convict Activism and the Reform of Penal Relocation in Colonial New South Wales: The Port Macquarie Penal Settlement, 1822–26

Australian Historical Studies, 2015

This article investigates how imperial legal reforms and convict activism combined to challenge t... more This article investigates how imperial legal reforms and convict activism combined to challenge the expanding system of internal ‘removal’ and ‘transportation’ in New South Wales during the 1820s. In particular, it explores how prisoners at the Port Macquarie penal settlement disputed the legal foundations of sentencing by colonial magistrates, contributing to the closure of the settlement and a flurry of ameliorative legislation. This article also examines the limits of imperial legal reform in a distant colony. Remediation of the convict relocation system was impeded by bureaucratic intransigence and by the new emphasis on convict subordination in the aftermath of the 1819–21 Royal Commission of Inquiry into the state of the colony of New South Wales.

Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 2014

This paper uses a comprehensive survey of sentencing patterns and penal regulations to demonstrat... more This paper uses a comprehensive survey of sentencing patterns and penal regulations to demonstrate the collapse of internal transportation in the colony of New South Wales into a system of extra-penal labour. It argues that a combination of judicial exigencies, local regulations, and creative misinterpretations of metropolitan penal reform turned the penal outpost established at Newcastle in 1804 into an experiment of interest to local and metropolitan reformers -an experiment that was rolled out throughout New South Wales, its peripheries, and in selected outposts of the British Empire after 1820.

Aboriginal History Journal, 2016

Jack Chambers, co-owner of Eva Downs Station in the Northern Territory, had an argument with his ... more Jack Chambers, co-owner of Eva Downs Station in the Northern Territory, had an argument with his Aboriginal cook, Dolly Ross. That morning, Ross had refused to prepare breakfast for her fellow Aboriginal pastoral workers because she said she was ill. Chambers claimed that Dolly was malingering because she had quarrelled with her husband. After the argument, Dolly, her husband Jim and a minor named Munro left the station. Chambers claimed that he had ordered them off the property. The Ross family testified that they had left in protest when Chambers threatened to 'liven up' Dolly if she did not do her work. Later that morning, Jack Chambers, Colin Chambers, manager Jack Britt, and stockmen George Booth and Francis Booth rode out from the station either to muster cattle or to pursue the Ross family. Either motive was possible: there were cattle to be mustered and all hands were needed on deck. The two parties met on the road a kilometre from Eva Downs. Their stories about what happened next differ fundamentally. The Chambers brothers claimed that Dolly and her family blocked the road and aggressively brandished sticks and boomerangs. Dolly, Jim and Munro said that the Chambers party attempted to run them down and that they held up their swags to deflect the horses. Whatever occurred, their confrontation ended in Jim Ross's beating and the repeated horsewhipping of all three. They were then driven back towards the station. Just inside the homestead gate, the party was confronted by two Aboriginal stockmen, Isaac Isaacs and Dinny McDinny, who, by all accounts, had come to defend the Ross family against the violence of their employers. The Chambers brothers attested at trial, Isaac attempted to 'belt' Jack Chambers with an iron bar. George Booth then fired two revolver shots over their heads,

The Convict Peace: The Imperial Context of the 1833 Convict Revolt at Castle Forbes

The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 2020

This paper places a well-known controversy about the jurisdiction of nineteenth-century magistrat... more This paper places a well-known controversy about the jurisdiction of nineteenth-century magistrates in its imperial context. In particular it shows how and why conversations about convict management and the jurisdiction of magistrates in New South Wales were interwoven with contemporary conversations about the law and government of slavery. In 1833 in the aftermath of the Castle Forbes Revolt, convicts, administrators and magistrates in New South Wales borrowed the language of disorder and good governance from debates about the amelioration of slavery because those languages made sense of an experience that was both deeply local and shared. Convicts were not slaves; but masters, magistrates, convicts and slaves all experienced substantial shifts in the relations among empire, colonial states and local institutions of governance that redefined their privileges and obligations in the first decades of the nineteenth century. The contest between magistrate-masters and convicts in the af...

The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 2017

Narratives of the history of international law in the early and middle decades of the nineteenth ... more Narratives of the history of international law in the early and middle decades of the nineteenth century have emphasised the role of global humanitarian movements in establishing international norms and institutions. The abolition of the slave trade and the amelioration of slavery feature prominently in this account as reform movements that supposedly laid the groundwork for human rights law. Using controversy about the constitution of the island of Trinidad and the excesses of its first governor, Thomas Picton, as a case study, we argue instead that attempts to reform slavery formed part of a wider British effort to construct a coherent imperial legal system, a project that corresponded to a different, and at the time more powerful vision of global order. As experiment and anti-model, Trinidad's troubles provided critics with an advertisement for the necessity of robust imperial legal power in new and old colonies. Such a call for imperial oversight of colonial legal orders formed the basis of an empire-wide push to reorder the British world.

Rage for Order, 2016

's jointly-written book is slim in size-197 pages of text, 74 of notes-but expansive in scope and... more 's jointly-written book is slim in size-197 pages of text, 74 of notes-but expansive in scope and interpretative ambition. It is a dense, complex piece of history, frequently operating on several levels at once. It asks us to rethink the study of international legal history in fundamental ways, not least by redrawing the boundaries between imperial, international, and global legal regimes. The authors pursue these arguments through an exploration of a series of overlapping projects of legal reform which took place within the British empire, and on its peripheries, in the first half of the 19th century. The book's methodological claims are compelling; its contentions about the British imperial constitution are powerful, but not wholly persuasive. Approached, however, as a book about a set of themes-rather than as an authoritative treatment of specific problems-Rage for Order represents an immensely significant intervention in a wide range of debates.

Heroes, villains, and wicked priests: Authority and story in the histories of Simon Schama

Clio, 1999

Heroes, Villains, and Wicked Priests: Authority and Story in the Histories of Simon Schama. by LI... more Heroes, Villains, and Wicked Priests: Authority and Story in the Histories of Simon Schama. by LISA FORD Simon Schama is perhaps the most widely read historian of the decade. While the historical merit of his work is beyond doubt, the most inter.

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Narratives of the history of international law in the early and middle decades of the nineteenth ... more Narratives of the history of international law in the early and middle decades of the nineteenth century have emphasized the role of global humanitarian movements in establishing international norms and institutions. The abolition of the slave trade, and the amelioration of slavery feature prominently in this account as reform movements that supposedly laid the groundwork for human rights law. Using controversy about the constitution of the island of Trinidad and about the excesses of its first Governor Thomas Picton as a case study, we argue instead that attempts to reform slavery formed part of a wider British effort to construct a coherent imperial legal system, a project that corresponded to a different, and at the time more powerful vision of global order. As experiment and antimodel, Trinidad's troubles provided critics with an advertisement for the necessity of robust imperial legal power in new and old colonies. Such call for imperial oversight of colonial legal orders formed the basis of an empirewide push to reorder the British world.

'Protecting the Peace on the Edges of Empire: Commissioners of Crown Lands in New South Wales', in Attwood, Benton and Clulow , Protection and Empire: A Global History, Cambridge University Press, pp. 175 - 193