Colonial powers invoked customary law as an evolving, inferior legal form without defining it

Evidence

In committing themselves to respecting “customary law,” the French did not explain exactly what they meant. On the one hand, the administration believed that the precolonial legal form was comparable in function to European law, although obviously inferior to it. On the other hand, the French did not assume that this custom was in any way static, and constantly stressed that any attempt at codification would interfere with the custom’s natural evolution under French rule. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 1081

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to debates on invented tradition and colonial legal pluralism — parallels Chanock and Snyder’s arguments that Europeans created the ‘customary law’ they claimed to respect.
• ADDENDUM: Relevant backdrop to colonial rule mechanisms; the logic of preserving ‘inferior but evolving’ institutions echoes how customary order was instrumentalized under empire.
• DEFINE: Clarifies what ‘respecting customary law’ actually meant operationally for the French administration.