I have three monograph projects in various stages of completion.

The Birth of the Liberal Democracy in the British Empire

‘Politics does not reflect majorities, it constructs them.’ – Stuart Hall

My completed monograph (under review) is a history of the ideology and institutions of democratic representation across the global British empire in the nineteenth century. It uses new archival research to argue that the rise of manhood and universal suffrage for white subjects corresponded with the effective disenfranchisement of other subjects from Bengal to Zululand. With the abolition of slavery, Bengali, Haudenosaunee, Maori, Xhosa and other non-European subjects were promised the liberal franchise as an inducement for inclusion in civilized commercial society. Yet over the century this promise was ultimately denied to them all

The Irruption of Modern Politics Into the British Empire

‘All paradises, all utopias are designed by who is not there, by the people who are not allowed in.’ – Toni Morrison

This monograph is the twin to the first. It recovers the birth of new forms of liberal politics opened up by the reality or promised of representative self-government in the British Empire over the nineteenth century. New archival research shows how the Haudenosaunee and Gundungurra, as well as black Jamaican, Indian, Maori and Xhosa, subjects used the colonial franchise to participate in colonial governance. These were remarkable experiments to advance alternative visions of co-existence against the colonial political economies of dominated by white-owned capital. Recovering their successes and especially failures is essential to better understand the limits of liberal politics under racial capitalism.

The Immanenists: Law and Revolution in the Cold War

‘About the turn of the century, Oxford was a nursery for running an empire; now it is a nursery for leaving the world exactly as it is.’ – Ernest Gellner

My third book project is an intellectual theory of ‘Third World’ legal theory in the context of the Cold War and decolonisation. It is an alternative to the dominant Anglo-American story of jurisprudence that aims to recover Marxisant legal schools that tried transform our understanding of nature of law—and so remake our world. At the moment, my project aims to connect three distinct movements that were intimately connected to Anglo-American jurisprudence: (i) B.R. Ambedkar’s emancipatory jurisprudence, (ii) the ‘Dar es Salaam school’ of law and political economy (including Yash Ghai, Mahmood Mamdani and Walter Rodney), and (iii) the Latin American liberation theologist in the 1960-70s. Each of these movements were a kind of ‘worldmaking’ (viz. Getachow) to construct immanent utopias.

Here I am talking about the postcolonial African coup cases and a jurisprudential debate stretching from Oxford and London to Dar es Salaam and Kampala, Accra and Salisbury.