Sovereignty and land tenure in the British Colonial Asia and Australia

Abstract

This thesis examines the question: How did British colonial agents in Asia and Australia interpret the relationship between sovereignty and land ownership? The question of this thesis reflects the real dilemma that British colonial agents faced in colonial territories in Asia. In the mid-18th century, the British legal theorist William Blackstone had defined sovereignty 's 'supreme, irresistible, absolute, uncontrolled authority', but in many colonial territories, British sovereignty was not a clear fact. For example, British East India Company's authority in Bengal relied on the right to collect tax (Diwan) for the Mughal Emperor. Under British feudal law, all land was owned by the sovereign; subjects possessed only tenure over the land, not the land itself. In Bengal (acquired after 1757), Penang (acquired in 1786), and Singapore (acquired in 1819), British colonial agents applied their feudal understanding of sovereignty and land tenure to determine the various pre-existing rights of local people over land, and to determine to what extent these rights constituted sovereignty or shared sovereignty over the land. The answers to these questions then indicated how these rights related to colonial rule. This thesis argues that British approaches to Asian systems of political rule were framed by ideas of feudalism. The thesis concludes by examining how these ideas of feudalism were applied to the colonies of New South Wales, Port Phillip and Sarawak . Show more