2025/10/18 by J. H. Song · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Politics and Conflicts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Middle East #South Asian Studies and Conflicts #Transboundary Water Resource Management
paper · doi:10.1080/03086534.2025.2571581
openalex created_date 2025/10/18 · openalex publication_date 2025/10/18 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/01
This article reinterprets the Doctrine of Lapse not as a uniform legal code or mere pretext for aggrandisement but as a situational instrument fashioned and applied at the colonial periphery. Centring on the annexation of Nagpur (1853–54), it reconstructs the Government of India’s deliberations through correspondence, legal memoranda, and council minutes to show that questions of right occupied the bulk of the formal argumentation, even as considerations of utility remained present. Annexation proceeded where three locally specific conditions converged: Nagpur’s dependent status under paramountcy; the dynasty’s own, well-attested succession norms; and the absence of a clear, timely act or declaration of adoption. The debate exposed competing imperial visions within the colonial state: Dalhousie and Halliday advanced a liberal-imperial case for direct rule and ‘improvement’, while Colonel John Low defended order and legitimacy through indirect rule and deference to indigenous law. The Court of Directors ultimately endorsed a conclusion already set in motion at Calcutta, underscoring the administrative autonomy of the periphery amid constraints of distance and communication. By recovering the legal reasoning and institutional politics that structured the Nagpur settlement, the article challenges functionalist, metropole-centred accounts and aligns with a Cambridge-school emphasis on provincial dynamics. It thus reframes the Doctrine of Lapse as contingent, argued, and variably enacted – an outcome of periphery-based governance rather than a mechanical, metropolitan fiat.