Making Sense of War’s Spoils: A Judge’s Notes from an Indian Courtroom, 1808-1814

The global wars of the Napoleonic era lasted nearly two decades and had a profound effect on the creation of the modern world. Even for those not directly connected to the warring powers, the nature of the conflict meant that nearly all inter-oceanic commerce could potentially be sucked into the fray. The prospect of spoils from capturing enemy merchant vessels incentivized combatants to make broad claims about the ‘enemy’ nature of all manner of vessels. Yet no capture or prize was complete without first passing muster with one of the many Admiralty courts spread out across the European colonial world. One such court, sitting in what is now Chennai in South India, adjudicated dozens of prize cases stemming from naval activity in the Indian Ocean and the area around Indonesia. 

A few years ago, the Penn Libraries acquired the unpublished manuscript notes of the admiralty judge of this court which present the facts of each case as well as his reasoning on why a particular vessel was lawfully captured or not. Many of the ships and merchants involved in these court proceedings were from purportedly neutral parts of South Asia not ruled by European powers. In this presentation, I will discuss the manuscript court notes and the window they provide on how British legal ideas about race, national belonging, and colonial sovereignty came to be formed.

About the Speaker

Mitch Fraas is a senior curator for special collections at the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries. He holds doctoral and master's degrees in history from Duke University and earned his bachelor's degree at Boston College. His doctoral dissertation examined the legal culture of British India in the 17th and 18th centuries. He is currently a principal investigator on a multi-institutional project to digitize over 500 manuscripts from the Islamicate world held in Philadelphia and New York libraries. In addition to the history of law and imperialism, he is especially interested in the history of printing and the book and in the digital humanities, as well as the future of scholarly publishing and copyright.