Common Law and Colonised Peoples
Product details
- ISBN 9781138612334
- Weight: 760g
- Dimensions: 152 x 219mm
- Publication Date: 30 Jul 2018
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
Published in 1997. It is well known in Australia that Aboriginal people are currently massively over-represented amongst the prison population. Although it is not officially acknowledged to the same degree in Trinidad, it is also well-known that Afro-Trinidadians are over-represented in the prisons of that county. The disproportionate criminalisation of Aboriginal Australians and Afro-Trinidadians is interpreted by the author as a continuation and concretion of the myth of the barbaric, uncivilised and ungoverned ‘savage; in opposition to which Western legal systems and societies have created their own identities.
The book departs from much contemporary analysis in this area by drawing strongly upon a historical analysis of the operations of the common law in Trinidad and Western Australia. By doing so, the book illustrates that race/ethnicity and criminalisation are not necessarily contiguous. What such analysis does reveal is another and more constant dimension to criminalisation; and that is economic basis of many of the legal relations instituted under British derived legal systems with respect to colonised peoples.
