Customs From the Other Shore

Abstract

Studies on early modern legal culture increasingly focus attention on the (limited) agency of “users” or “consumers” of justice, and the strategies devised by litigants and witnesses in relationship to the institutional codes of the legal system. Besides drawing the Dutch colonial empire into the debates, this article explicitly wants to shift attention away from criminal procedures, and highlight the neglected potential of interrogations and cross-examinations in civil suits to study the concept of Justitznutzung. Eighteenth-century colonial Sri Lanka will serve as a cross-cultural legal laboratory where litigants negotiated uncodified Sinhalese, Tamil and “Moorish” laws with Roman-Dutch law. Drawing on information from over 300 civil cases in VOC courts, four influential manuals of Roman-Dutch procedural law and seven transcripts of civil interrogations and cross-examinations, this article explores how the translation of Roman-Dutch codified law into the plural legal context of littoral Sri Lanka created a legal grey area that offered considerable opportunities for litigants and their legal representatives, with interrogations and cross-examinations as the perfect playground to devise a winning legal strategy.