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Law and empire: The Armenians contra vereist, 1769–77

In the summer 1770, a group of Armenian merchants brought an action against Harry Vereist who had just returned home from his governorship in Bengal. They sought and eventually obtained compensation for losses said to have been incurred as a result of imprisonment on false grounds. A sequence of cases heard in London before the Court of Common Pleas, the Court of Exchequer and the House of Lords touched fundamental issues raised by the export and operation of English law overseas. This study illustrates how the judicature was faced with the difficult task of providing a legal framework that would accommodate countries brought within the structure of a diversified empire by the extension of British power in the second half of the eighteenth century. The problems of adjustment were particularly acute in India, ruled by a commercial company, where other systems of law, legal customs and conceptions of justice had long been in existence. The Armenian cases received considerable coverage in the contemporary press. Their presence in London, pursuing their cause before the principal courts of justice and before the House of Lords, helped both to cultivate an awareness of metropolitan responsibility for protecting the rights of inhabitants in different parts of the globe who had come under British rule, and to awaken the interest of a wider public in the problems of governing British possessions in the East.