Colonialism, Culture, and the Law: A Foreword

its first fluores- cence, that literature evinced a rather crude topos. Its primary concern was to demonstrate the importance of legalities, broadly defined, in the imposi- tion of control by Europe over its various “others”: how law was “the cutting edge of colonialism, an instrument of the power of an alien state and part of the process of coercion” (Chanock