Teaching Public Law through Empire’s Archive

UK courts have constructed a memory of the UK constitution which contains a ‘blind spot’ relating to the British Empire, the history of the Empire, and the way in which the Empire created different classes of British subjecthood and citizenship. Here the term ‘British Empire’ is used to refer to the UK’s imperial possessions. This chapter explores the ways in which the Empire has shaped the development of Public Law in the 21st century, and how mainstream approaches to teaching and presenting Public Law manage to recreate and reinforce imperial rationalities. As a result, we do not have an accurate perception or picture of the UK’s constitution, which is presented in many student textbooks without any imperial or colonial context.

There is a wealth of archival and historical information and documentation available to scholars to access at The National Archives in London. This chapter explores how archival materials can be used to explore the development of core public law principles such as the rule of law and political accountability. These archival materials allow us to go beyond the words of judges and judgments, and to read the justifications of the actions of UK government ministers and colonial officials, as well as the testimony of the many subaltern peoples who are so often left voiceless or regulated to footnotes in legal texts and judgments.

I use the examples of the legal challenges resulting from the Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica in 1865 and the Kenyan Uprising in the 1950s to show how archival resources can both add to and reshape our understandings of how both cases fit into the UK’s constitution. I will also explain how it is possible to introduce this style of teaching and research into any public law module in the UK.