Elizabeth Kolsky

Bio: Elizabeth Kolsky is an academic researcher. The author has contributed to research in topics: Common law & Criminal law. The author has an hindex of 1, co-authored 1 publications receiving 20 citations.

The Rule of Colonial Indifference: Rape on Trial in Early Colonial India, 1805–57

Abstract: This article explores the history of intraracial (Indian-on-Indian) rape in early colonial India. Though at times uneven and unpredictable in their rulings, British judges created a set of evidentiary requirements and a body of legal decisions that were as harsh on rape victims as the precolonial Islamic system was presumed to be. Despite the colonial promise of a more modern and humane criminal law, the gradual displacement of Islamic law did little to widen rape victims' path to legal remedy. English common law presumptions about the frequency of false charges and a suspicion of women's claims combined with a colonial insistence on the peculiarity of Indian culture to make it difficult for victims of rape to prevail in court. The colonial legal treatment of the “unsensational” crime of rape was rather unsensational. It largely reflected contemporary trends in England, which raises the important question of what was distinctively colonial about it.

Sex, Law, and Society in Late Imperial China

Abstract: prerogative of Europe alone” (456). In his detailed exploration of the very real internal tensions of’ late imperial administrationmost centr;illy, between moralism and pragmatism---Riowe is able also to unmask, then, one of the false tensions of early modem global history: the claim that a monolithic “West” outpaced a still-evolving “East” in the development of major core philosophical principles of governance.

European Colonialism since 1700

Abstract: 1. Introduction 2. The European empires in the early eighteenth century 3. The restructuring of the Atlantic empires 4. The new empires in Oceania and Asia 5. Africa and the Middle East 6. Imperial Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries 7. Decolonisation and postcolonial Europe.