Warwick Law School News

Congratulations to Maximilien Zahnd and Signe Larsen on securing a British Academy small grant in support of their research.

Maximilien Zahnd

All Hail King Salmon: Colonial Tax, Corporate Capitalism, and the Rise of the Territory of Alaska, 1912–1939

Grant sum awarded: £9930.50

This project proposes to examine the tax relationship between colonial governments and resource-extractive corporations. It endeavours to show how the tax history of the salmon industry provides important insight into the complex relationship between colonial governments and corporate capitalism, as well as the latter's impact on Indigenous peoples and their environment.

Signe Larsen

Post-Imperial Unions: Federal, Transnational, and Regional Constitutionalism after Empires

Grant sum awarded: £10,000

What if the European Union were not a historical anomaly, but part of a broader - now largely forgotten - global pattern? In response to imperial decline after WWI, political leaders and intellectuals across Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean explored constitutional alternatives to both empire and the nation-state. In this project, I develop the concept of ‘post-imperial unions’ to describe the federal, regional, and transnational constitutional projects proposed in the fifty years following WWI - including the European Economic Community, the failed European Defence Community, the Commonwealth, the French Union, the West Indies Federation, and constitutional debates over post-colonial futures in India and Africa. Through comparative archival research in London, Paris, Florence, Delhi, and Lahore, the project recovers the ideas that animated this global constitutional movement. In doing so, it challenges nation-state-centred models of constitutional order and reopens the question of constitutional alternatives to empire in an age of resurgent imperial geopolitics.

Congratulations to them both.