Using nineteenth-century case law, legal and social theory, and ethnography, this essay will examine colonial attempts to coalesce complex relational identities into individual and collective ones, and to create ‘the Hindu joint family’ as a codified ritual and property-holding collective. Focussing on texts and court cases that considered the ‘joint family’ as a social unit under siege or a property collective at the point of dissolution, we can see how individuals were forced to privilege certain social and intimate bonds above others in establishing a clear identity before the state. The importance of the creation of alienable property rights and markets in land became a clear motive for supporting the North Indian Hindu joint family as a social norm across India. Courts felt free to assign identities and to codify customs when confronted with syncretic practices or blurred ‘traditions’ that had characterised eighteenth-century families.

In the 1870s, Indian news editors warned their readers of a series of crises threatening India. They saw the famines, wars, and poverty that they were describing as symptoms of the same illness: Colonial governors had failed to implement an ethical system of governance, and had therefore failed to create a healthy body politic, choosing to expend energy in punishing or censoring dissent when they should have been constructing more durable civic institutions. In North India, earlier Mughal traditions of political philosophy and governance offered a template to critique the current state. In drawing on these traditions, editors linked multiple registers of dissent, from simple ‘fables’ about emperors to more sophisticated arguments drawn from newly reinterpreted akhlaq texts, creating a print record of the multilingual, multivalent literary and oral worlds of Indian political thought. The figures of the Mughal emperors Akbar and Aurangzeb, representing the zenith and nadir of Mughal sovereignty, in turn linked popular and learned discussions on statecraft, good governance, and personal responsibility in an age of crisis. The press itself became a meeting point for multivalent discourses connecting South Asian publics, oral and literate, in their exploration of the nature of just rule in the context of empire, calling, in the process, new ‘publics’ into being.

This special edition of the Indian Economic and Social History Review explores the ways in which law provided a forum for the construction of new notions of gender, family and community relationships in South Asia. Law, which has proved a rich site for debates about the impact of colonial rule in this region, is not a subject that has been neglected by scholars of South Asia. The development of the colonial legal system has received particular attention from historians interested in the relationship between power and knowledge in British India. 1 Exploring the ways in which colonial governance and ethnography served to reshape existing social customs, these studies have demonstrated the highly constructed nature of colonial law. Exposing some of the contradictions at the heart of colonial rhetoric and policy, these works formed a crucial intervention in discussions about models of social and economic development. They have shown that, in spite of colonial officials' stated desire to refrain from intervening in Indian society, the very practice of classifying practices as 'traditional' in order to preserve them from state power often served to alter them significantly. This has helped to expose the highly complex dynamics of colonial rule: the colonial state often protected precisely those 'backward' social practices it proclaimed itself to be eradicating in order to justify its control.

Histories of the family and household in South Asia, while they appear at first to represent a micro‐historical and regional approach, have in recent years engaged with global histories of ideas and material culture. This article argues that studying ‘imperial social formation’ at the level of the family provides important insights into the ways in which global and local forces interact and coexist. It provides us with the means to write a ‘thicker’ history of the development of the modern global economy as well as more precisely charting the evolution of political forces in the colonial and postcolonial world. Looking at recent work by a new generation of historians blurring traditional disciplinary boundaries, ‘family histories’ offer a means of reconciling micro and macro historiographies of modern South Asia.