5 Customary Law: Noble Peoples,
Savage Mountaineers
Why [did Kazbich kill Bela], what do you think? These
Circassians have got thieving in their blood. They’ll steal
anything, given the chance. Even things they don’t want – they’ll
take them just the same. They just can’t help it. And besides he’d
long had a fancy for her.
Lermontov’s Maksim Maksimych in A Hero of Our Time^1Historians of colonialism have convincingly added customary law to
the growing list of the many “invented traditions” of the modern age.^2
Colonial administrators attempted to create a recognizable order in the
colonies, and in the process they transformed, as Kristin Mann and
Richard Roberts write, “fluid cultural and legal ideas and relationships
into reproducible rules.”^3 From Africa to Southeast Asia, colonial ad-
ministrators were interested in law for several related reasons: the ad-
ministration of justice was a means of colonial control, law sometimes
served to introduce the new moral order of Foucault’s “disciplined”
West, such order in turn promoted economic productivity, and the ar-
rival of the rule of law served as evidence of Europe’s civilizing and
beneficial work in the colonies.^4 The elaboration and consolidation of
tribal identities was one of the more significant results of this colonial
interest in the traditions of customary law.^5
Russia’s empire shared several important similarities with the gen-
eral Western colonial experience. Like the French in Algeria, the
Russians fought a long war against insurgents based in the mountains,
and hence colonial control remained paramount in the minds of wary
officials in regions only recently “pacified,” as the conquest was called
by officials of both victorious powers. Like many European colonial of-
ficials, Russian administrators were also notably proud of their intro-
duction of new concepts of law in the borderlands. Alexander i
declared to the Georgians in 1801 that their annexation by the Russian
Empire was motivated, not by “greed” or for “the expansion of bound-
aries,” but in order to “give everyone the protection of law” (dat’