State making in colonial contexts always involved contests over the configuration of plural legal systems. But what occurred in places of “informal empire,” where Western powers did not assert political control and did not therefore assume the task of overseeing legal administration? One might expect conflicts over the architecture of the legal order – the relation between indigenous and imposed law, or between state and nonstate legal authority – to assume a less prominent place in political and cultural discourse. The establishment of Western models of law might seem merely to follow pervasive pressures to facilitate interstate bargaining and international investment, and to flow from elite intercultural influences and Westernized education.

As in places of formal colonial control, though, debates about legal pluralism in settings of informal empire had a special place in political and cultural imagination; recurring legal conflicts, particularly jurisdictional disputes, had a tendency to keep these issues in prominent view; and legal interactions had their own transformative power. The idea and reality of a territorial sovereignty in which state law subsumed other legal authorities emerged in part in response to the dynamics of legal conflicts in complex arrangements of mixed power. In places with strikingly different legal traditions, the mid-nineteenth century saw the construction (and continual restructuring) of legal orders that simultaneously built on older forms of legal pluralism and gestured toward stronger claims of state power.