Mr. Mothercountry: The Man Who Made the Rule of Law

"Keally McBride has written a brilliant and important book that takes head on our sacrosanct myth of the rule of law by means of a sustained and deeply historical analysis of nineteenth century British colonial rule. This wide-ranging book, that spans Aristotle, Montesquieu, and Judith Shklar, and engages the writings of British colonial historians and theorists, traces a fascinating genealogyin both senses of the termof the Clapham Sect and the Stephen clan ... This is a formative book that challenges and surely will reshape the way we understand the rule of law ... I can't wait to engage the debates that it will spawn." - Bernard E. Harcourt, Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law, Professor of Political Science, and Director, Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought, Columbia University

"In Mr. Mothercountry, Keally McBride has done something extraordinary. She discovered an administrator of the British empire James Stephen who not only promoted the rule of law, but could also be said to have invented it. Stephen was a true believer and sought to create transparent, clear and fair rules in the British colonies that he helped to oversee. Mr. Mothercountry speaks both to the possibilities inherit in the concept of the rule of law as well as its limitations, the way that it readily gets hijacked by imperial and commercial interests, and the impossibility of keeping it purely neutral and non-arbitrary. Mr. Mothercountry takes on the concept of rule of law in its ideal, or at least best case, form and shows that its darker features can neither be eliminated nor completely controlled for. This book is a tour de force," - James Martel, author of The One and Only Law: Walter Benjamin and the Second Commandment

"This beautifully written book bores into the complicated relationship between the rule of law and imperial governance by focusing on the life and work of colonial administrator and author, James Stephen. In its exceptional braiding of historical detail, context, close reading, and conceptual sophistication, Mr. Mothercountry brings the past to bear on our contemporary condition in a manner that is both illuminating and troubling. McBrides book thus enriches significantly the growing body of scholarship on the long and troubled entanglements of imperialism, sovereignty, liberalism, hierarchy, and the practical and theoretical workings of the law." - Jeanne Morefield, author of Empires without Imperialism: Anglo-American Decline and the Politics of Deflection