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ENQUIRE PROJECT DETAILS BY GENERAL PUBLIC |
| Project Details |
| Funding Scheme : | Early Career Scheme | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Project Number : | 24601320 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Project Title(English) : | The Exportation and Evolution of Vagrancy Laws in the Nineteenth Century British Empire: From the Caribbean to Hong Kong | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Project Title(Chinese) : | 十九世紀大英帝國流浪法的輸出與演變：從加勒比海到香港 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Principal Investigator(English) : | Prof Roberts, Christopher | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Principal Investigator(Chinese) : | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Department : | Faculty of Law | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Institution : | The Chinese University of Hong Kong | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| E-mail Address : | christopher.roberts@cuhk.edu.hk | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Tel : | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Co - Investigator(s) : |
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| Panel : | Humanities, Social Sciences | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Subject Area : | Social and Behavioural Sciences | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Exercise Year : | 2020 / 21 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Fund Approved : | 408,100 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Project Status : | Completed | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Completion Date : | 31-12-2022 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Project Objectives : |
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| Abstract as per original application (English/Chinese): |
During the long nineteenth century, two developments occurred simultaneously. First, the British Empire dramatically expanded across the globe. Second, the structure of British law and governance was dramatically reformed, across many areas. While both of these developments have been widely observed, their close interrelationship has not been adequately explored to date. My research aims to address this shortcoming.
In particular, my past and ongoing research focuses on the evolution of public order laws and institutions in Britain and the British Empire over the course of the long nineteenth century. Work I have already done has explored the manner in which colonial legality evolved out of emergency law regimes, leading to the incorporation of various aspects of exceptional legality into everyday legal contexts (Roberts, 2019), as well as the manner in which the repressive tools of the British state expanded dramatically in response to progressive activism in the late eighteenth century (Roberts, 2020). Currently, I am exploring the manner in which approaches to public order governance developed between 1800 and 1900 in Britain, including through the development of a more modern, professionalized police service, as well as through new laws governing and penalizing ‘vagrancy’ and similar categories.
My proposed new project will build on this past work. In particular, the aim of the project is to explore the manner in which the vagrancy law model that developed in England was exported to the British colonial world, how the model changed over time, and how developments in the colonial context reflected back on experiences in Britain in turn. In that context, the research will explore the implementation of vagrancy laws in the Caribbean and Mauritius, Ceylon, Ireland, India, the Cape Colony, the Straits Settlements, the East African Protectorate, Northern Nigeria, and Hong Kong. As well as examining similarities and differences amongst these laws, their aims and modes of enforcement, and the manner in which approaches to ‘vagrancy' evolved over time, the research will also consider the connections between those laws and the development of key public order institutions, including the police in particular, as well as exploring the different ideologies relied upon to justify those laws. Ultimately, the aim is both to produce scholarship that will reframe debates about the nature of public order law and the role of the colonial experience in the shaping of that law, as well as to contribute to contemporary efforts towards progressive legal reform. 在漫長的十九世紀，兩種發展同時發生。首先，大英帝國在全球範圍內迅速擴張。其次，英國的法律和治理結構在許多領域進行了重大變革。雖然這兩項發展已得到廣泛的關注，但迄今尚未充分探討它們之間的密切相互關係。我的研究旨在解決這一缺點。 特別是，我過去和現在的研究重點是在漫長的十九世紀中，英國和大英帝國公共秩序法律和制度的演變。我已經完成了探討從緊急狀態法進化出來的殖民的合法性政權，導致異常合法性擴展到日常法律語境的各個方面(罗伯茨,2019)，以及英國的專制工具為應對在十八世紀晚期的進步運動的急劇擴大(罗伯茨,2020)的工作。目前，我正在探索1800年到1900年英國公共秩序治理方法的發展方式，包括通過發展一個更現代、更專業化的警察服務，以及通過管理和懲罰“流浪”和類似類別的新法律。 我提出的新項目將以過去的工作為基礎。特別是，該項目的目的是探索在英國發展起來的流浪法模式是如何被輸出到英國殖民世界的，這種模式是如何隨著時間的推移而改變的，以及殖民背景下的發展是如何反過來反映在英國的經驗上。在此背景下，本研究將探討流浪法在加勒比海地區、毛里求斯、錫蘭、愛爾蘭、印度、開普殖民地、海峽殖民地、東非保護國、尼日利亞北部和香港的實施情況。以及研究在這些法律中，它們的目標和執行模式，和“流浪”隨著時間的推移進化的方式方法的異同，這項研究還將考慮這些法律和關鍵公共秩序機構的發展，特別是警察之間的聯繫，以及探索用來證明這些法律正當性的不同的意識形態。最終，目標是產生一種理論，它將重新組織關於公共秩序法的性質的探討，以及殖民經驗在法律形成過程中所起的作用，同時也將有助於當代努力實現的漸進的法律改革。 |
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| Realisation of objectives: | The project objectives were all successfully achieved. Through the project, it was possible to explore vagrancy laws' legacies across the United Kingdom, the British Empire, including Hong Kong in particular, and the British settler colonial world. This exploration considered how those laws were drafted; when and where they were exported; what other institutional and theoretical developments they were connected to; the similarities and differences in the application of these laws across contexts; the changing function of such laws over time; connections between these laws and other laws with similar effect and/or intent; challenges to such laws and legal orders, and their significance; and the problematic, ongoing legacy of such laws today. In doing so, the project constituted the first attempt to map the history of such laws across the entirety of the broader British imperial world, as well as one of the most globalized histories of vagrancy law to date. There is no doubt this would not have been possible without the inspired, pioneering work in different contexts that has come before. At the same time, mapping the long-term, global trajectory of such laws is also crucial, not least because it helps to make clear the limitations of accounts that are too narrowly grounded in one context. Indeed, one of the key insights of the work was the recognition that vagrancy laws have been justified on dozens of different bases, and have served dozens of different precise purposes, in different times and places; understanding such laws in the aggregate, however, and their persistence over time, requires not only understanding any of those particular rationales and functions, but rather the endurance of such laws across contexts and purposes as well. Most overarchingly in this context, the project was able to highlight the significance of the evolution of vagrancy laws to the evolution of the ‘rule of law’ as such. In particular, such laws accompanied expansions in executive, judicial, and police powers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and provided new authorities a ready source of discretionary they could utilize while their mandates were being more firmly established. This observation is to a degree critical of the idea of the rule of law, that was also developing at the time, insofar as it recognizes that far from absolutely opposed to discretionary authority, the rule of law in actuality relied on discretionary authority to expand itself, at least relative to the poorest. Over time, however, the more idealistic vision of the rule of law was able to have its moment too, especially through challenges in United States courts between the 1950s and 1970s, which led to vagrancy laws being declared unconstitutional there. These developments soon had echoes in other polities around the common law world as well. In addition to piecing together the different pieces of this history, the project was also able to highlight a further, global legacy to the relevant developments – a second wave of challenges to vagrancy laws that gathered steam in several African jurisdictions in the twenty-first century, was crowned by a 202 Advisory Opinion by the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights, and which is still ongoing. Despite waves of challenges to vagrancy laws, however, those laws are still very much with us. In the first place, some jurisdictions still have explicitly ‘vagrancy’-penalizing laws on the books, law which are, at times, justified in constitutional text. More broadly, however, even where vagrancy laws have been repealed, ‘vagrancy-type’ laws on various sorts, including prohibitions of loitering, begging, homelessness, broad and vague nuisance laws and overly-broadly applied traffic offences have taken their place. While operating under different headings, these legal orders replicate a great deal of the harms initially enabled by vagrancy laws. The project thus contains a double call to action – both to complete the process of repealing the more explicit vagrancy law legacy, and to address its ongoing presence in legal orders under different names. In terms of outputs, the proposal imagined two journal articles, one conference presentation and a policy reform report. In reality, these goals were exceeded, with one lengthy journal article, a solo-authored book chapter, two book chapters co-authored with my research assistant, and the policy reform report produced and shared via the Transnational Legal History's Group's webpage. In addition, the outcomes of the research were shared at five different international conferences, in five different jurisdictions in Asia and Europe, at conferences that were livecast to participants around the world. The research conducted will also help support a future book project, on the history of public order legality in the British Empire. This is a large project, on which work is still ongoing, that will draw on future research activities as well. At the same time, the research conducted through this ECS grant provided invaluable inputs to that broader work. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Summary of objectives addressed: |
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| Research Outcome | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Major findings and research outcome: | The project resulted in five research outputs: one article in a U.S. law journal; one solo-authored book chapter; two book chapters co-authored with my research assistant; and a policy reform report, published by the Transnational Legal History Group at CUHK. The article in the U.S. law journal is lengthy (around 30,000 words), and provides an extensive overview of the history of vagrancy laws in the British Empire between the early nineteenth century and today, bringing numerous contexts that are normally considered alone into conversation, and highlighting geographical diversity and, even more noticeably, change over time. The insights of that article are too extensive to highlight in brief, but overarchingly it takes the study of vagrancy law significantly further than it has gone to date, and provides a solid basis on which comparative investigation may develop in future. The solo-authored book chapter provides a different sort of account, arguing that vagrancy laws are connected to the development in the nineteenth century of particularly problematic ways of viewing the world, that at their extreme led to eugenicist, racist theories. As such it extends the import of the investigation more directly into the history of ideas as such, providing a new vantage point from which to consider the relevant histories. The two articles co-written with my research assistant are based on extensive archival research in Hong Kong’s archives, and provide a detailed history of the development of vagrancy laws from the 1840s through to the late twentieth century in Hong Kong specifically. The policy reform report provides a brief history of vagrancy laws not only in the British but also in other European empires, outlines several of the legal measures forming part of the vagrancy law legacy still on the books in numerous jurisdictions around the world today, and presents a summary of legal arguments that may be used to challenge such laws. As such, it provides a valuable resource for all those interesting in combatting such legal orders. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Potential for further development of the research and the proposed course of action: |
Vagrancy laws are an interesting and compelling component of legality because they combine labor discipline and public order functions. The project’s exploration can be further developed through historical investigation of other components of legality that sit at this intersection. From a different perspective, this is the subject of the PI’s current GRF, focused on the history of forced labor regulation (encompassing vagrancy laws as well as many other legal orders). As such, many of the insights are already being developed in ongoing research. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Layman's Summary of Completion Report: | The project explores the history of vagrancy and vagrancy-type laws in the British Empire. These are very broad and vague laws that penalize a range of activities seen, by the laws’ framers at least, as related, including being poor and/or unemployed, moving around, seeming suspicious, engaging in the informal economy, and engaging in activity deemed of questionable morality. The project considered how such laws were generated, the manner in which such laws were disseminated across the British Empire over its long history, and the challenges they have come under in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In presenting a global history, the project helps make clear how connected the legal experiences of numerous different jurisdictions today have been. In exploring the challenges that have and have not been made to vagrancy laws, the project helps to bring out the lack of attention, in much discourse and practice focus on the development of ‘the rule of law,’ to the discretionary application of the law against the poor. In exploring the challenges vagrancy laws have faced, and the state of such laws around the world today, the project helps provide additional resources to those who seek to challenge such laws. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Research Output | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Peer-reviewed journal publication(s) arising directly from this research project : (* denotes the corresponding author) |
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| Recognized international conference(s) in which paper(s) related to this research project was/were delivered : |
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| Other impact (e.g. award of patents or prizes, collaboration with other research institutions, technology transfer, etc.): |
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| Realisation of the education plan: | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
| SCREEN ID: SCRRM00542 |