ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the problem of sovereignty within the liberal colonial govern-mentality fashioned during this period. Looking back to the great revolt of 1857-58 it begin by examining the use of law to regulate the sovereign power of excess and its modern legacy, whipping. The chapter examines the manner in which colonial government accommodated and rehabilitated forms of traditional native authority, reshaping them for modern purposes. Then its turns into the shifting emphasis in this matrix from something like pure repression to modes of power activated by a more nuanced understanding of the criminal tribes as economic subjects. Finally, the chapter returns to the knowledge bases supporting these increasingly dispersed practices of government and efforts made to define the parameters of a new, colonial, criminology of the Indian subject. From the late eighteenth century onward British authority in India had worked assiduously not only to secure paramountcy in military-diplomatic terms but the monopoly of the right to take life.
