H enry M aine and the Re‐Constitution of the B ritish E mpire

You might find it strange that a political scientist has written the most important study of Sir Henry Sumner Maine in over a century. If you are familiar with his reputation, you will be surprised anyone has bothered to study him at all. Few intellectual reputations have suffered as steep a posthumous decline as his.No one today would claim Maine as an intellectual ancestor, nor refer to his work except for the odd obscure footnote.Yet in the mid-late nineteenth century, Maine was the towering British legal scholar, holding a succession of prestigious academic posts in Cambridge, Oxford and London. His published works, especially Ancient Law (1861) and Village Communities in the East and West (1871), were recognised as classics in their time and were debated by leading thinkers from John Stuart Mill to Mohandas Gandhi. Maine served as the Legal Member of Governor-General’s Council in India from 1862 to 1869. During these years he also published many popular pieces in magazines like the Saturday Review and St. James’s Gazette. Scholar, lawyer, imperial administrator and public intellectual: Maine appeared to have been the most eminent ofVictorians. Why then has next to nothing been written on his ideas in the last century? Karuna Mantena does not answer this question in Alibis of Empire. At least, not directly.The two dedicated studies of Maine’s thought coinciding with the centenary of his death failed to persuade anyone else to take more than an antiquarian interest in him. In Sir Henry Maine:A Study inVictorian Jurisprudence, Raymond Cocks gives an admirable exposition of the key elements of Maine’s legal thought. But in his attempt to show the reception of Maine’s ‘historical jurisprudence’, Cocks looks to sociology, anthropology and legal positivism, and