CLT Singapore Symposium for Legal Theory with Dr. Alastair McClure on 26 March 2025

In the seminar “Trials of Sovereignty: Mercy, Discretion, and Colonial Rule” held on 26^th March, Dr Alastair McClure interrogates the role of mercy and discretion as integral yet deeply contested mechanisms of colonial governance in nineteenth- and twentieth-century India. Rather than viewing pardons, amnesties, and sentence commutations as mere acts of benevolence, McClure situates them within a strategic framework of state legitimacy, where selective leniency was wielded to reinforce colonial authority while subtly coercing subjects into engagement with imperial institutions. However, this calculated deployment of mercy also exposed the fragility of colonial rule, as its selective nature rendered sovereign power susceptible to scrutiny and resistance. Over time, colonial subjects came to recognize the contradictions embedded within the rhetoric of British justice, using legal and political means to challenge the discretionary exercise of state power. By the early twentieth century, the refusal to accept mercy had itself become a radical political act—an assertion of autonomy that transformed defiance of colonial law into an assertion of self-rule. In examining this dialectic of power and resistance, Trials of Sovereignty reframes mercy not as a symbol of sovereign magnanimity but as a volatile instrument of rule, one that ultimately fuelled the very anticolonial movements it sought to contain.