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This chapter outlines the economic and political considerations involved in the creation of the British opium regime in Asia. It traces opium in a “cohesive trade structure” that Britons, Indians, and Chinese created through the energetic pursuit of profitable trade, and which Britain dominated, and gained the greatest advantage from. The chapter notes that a “bifurcated framework of formal colonialism and the imperialism of free trade” characterized the British presence in Asia in the nineteenth century. It explains that through the said formal colonialism, Britain was able to impose the legalization of opium in China after 1858, and thereby secure an important financial pillar of its far-flung political empire.

This chapter shows that the lack of consensus on new policing resulted in the strengthening of the fractures present in the writing of crime from the earliest reformist days. Since the British colonial regime continued the attempts to empower itself by making extensive use of the rhetoric of crime, it also faced a radical questioning of its legitimacy that grew from the potential for opposition that was inherent in that very rhetoric. The chapter also considers the role of the novel in 19th-century British ruleship.

The concept of conventions emerged from British scholars who wrote on the relationships between law and politics. Among these British scholars is Sir Ivor Jennings who distinguished conventions from non-obligatory usages or practices. To him, conventions are supported by constitutional reasons and principles and are a homogenous group of rules. This chapter examines the emergence of constitutional conventions in HKSAR. It refers to the case of Hong Kong to illuminate the evolution of conventions from the British regime to the Chinese governance, with special focus and emphasis on the resignations of principal officials of HKSAR.

The Imperial Record Department was formed in March 1891. This chapter looks at the objectives and issues before the new Record Department in the first 25 years of its life. While the stronger voice from within the bureaucracy spoke of the archive as an instrument of governance, there was another approach that laid emphasis on ideological issues, Britain’s imperial image, and the interpretation of the past of the Indian Empire. The chapter also explores the routine functions that the Imperial Record Department was expected to perform. It also traces the events that serve to illustrate, first, the stout resistance of the bureaucracy to opening the records not only of the British Indian government, but also records of pre-British regimes in their possession, and second, the equally staunch struggle of the Indian intelligentsia to recover their own historical records.

This chapter looks at Indian democratic institutions. Contrary to popular belief, the British did little or nothing to promote the growth of democratic institutions in India. Instead, Indian nationalists from the late nineteenth century onward successfully appropriated liberal-democratic principles from the United Kingdom and infused them into the Indian political context. Under the influence of Mohandas K. Gandhi in the 1930s, these beliefs and principles were disseminated to a broad swath of India's population via the Indian National Congress, the leading nationalist political party. As this was occurring, the British colonial regime was losing few opportunities to thwart or at least contain the growth of democratic sentiment and practice in India. The Indian nationalists can justifiably claim that each step toward self-rule and democratic governance was the result of sustained and unrelenting political agitation against authoritarian colonial rule.