Imperial crises pushed colonial officials from liberal reform toward autocratic rule

Evidence

The Great Wahhabi Case provides crucial material for understanding the construction, and ultimately the deconstruction, of this Phantom Wahhabi. In the case-law, the trial established the government’s power to suspend perpetually the right of habeas corpus in India. Studied purely in terms of the recorded decisions, therefore, the case documents the conservative ideological shift that occurred in the wake of rebellion in India and colonial unrest in Jamaica and Ireland. Faced with the threat of what they increasingly viewed as irrational and violent colonial populations, colonial officials turned away from liberal reform and embraced autocratic strategies of governance rooted in ideas of colonial difference. — Julia Stephens, The Phantom Wahhabi, 20

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the post-1857 Raj and to histories of emergency law and habeas corpus suspension across the British Empire.
• SEED: An essay on how colonial courts build the legal architecture for permanent exception — the trial that made indefinite detention ordinary.