ABSTRACT
The chapter asks: how did Law and Development (L&D) become what it is today? Contemporary L&D studies are embedded within a world order undergridded by a de facto hierarchy of states encompassing a paradox of sovereignty where formal equality of states coexists with the institutionalisation of unequal economic, political and ideological power relations between former colonial powers and colonised nations. Using the example of South Asia, I argue that contemporary L&D under the United Nations (UN) system is a geo-historically constituted regime where law and legal norms are institutionalised to sustain unequal relations between states and privilege transnational corporations. The legal-institutional regime builds on principles of colonial governance, especially the system of Indirect Rule developed by the British colonial jurists, administrators and legal scholars within the British Empire and continues to reproduce colonial relations in new forms which provide the conceptual building blocks for L&D under the UN system today..
