based on status to one based on contract, appealed strongly to a midVictorian generation become increasingly sensitized to evolutionary theories.The lectures of this former Law Member for India also had important an important impact on Indian administrators, who were warned that English assumptions about law and economics could not simply be exported wholesale to the subcontinent. These were important lessons for a generation of civil servants coming to terms with the aftermath of the Indian Mutiny of 1857.19 Maine’s work also spoke to awide variety of other non-legal audiences, including historians and anthropologists.20 Moreover, no lawyer after 1861 could read Austin’s work but through the filter of Maine’s work. Yet Maine’s contextual approach did not transform the way practising lawyers, or even legal theorists, went about their task. If his torch burned brightly in his own lifetime, the light was not regarded after his death as a lasting one. Despite Maine’s efforts to develop a form of historical jurisprudence, and one which might have opened the way to a sociological one, the theoretical study of law remained solidly analytical.21A number of reasons may be suggested for Maine’s limited impact on English jurists. Firstly, he saw his task as supplemental to Austin’s, correcting his historical errors, rather than challenging his contemporary relevance.The telos of Maine’s development was precisely the individualistic modern society, in which rights-bearing subjects interacted in an extensive state secured by a sovereign legislature, on which Austin had premised his work. Maine conceded that Austinian jurisprudence - and modern political economy - was as suitable for England as it was unsuitable for India. Secondly,Maine’s work did not examine the kinds of doctrinal issues which were of interest to practitioners. His theories examined the bigger picture of the nature of legal development in the long term; but he did not explore how practising lawyers might develop the doctrines of civil obligation.Maine did not offer a legal theory which would help lawyers to clarify or classify their concepts - as Austin promised - but neither did he articulate for them re cht swi s s e n scha f t al s j ur i st i sch e dok t r i n 138 19 See Karuna Mantena, ‘Law and “Tradition”: Henry Maine and the Theoretical Origins of Indirect Rule’, in A. Lewis and M. Lobban (ed), Law and History: Current Legal Issues vol 6 (Oxford, 2004), pp. 159-88. 20 See A. Diamond (ed), TheVictorian Achievement of Sir Henry Maine: a Centennial Reappraisal (Cambridge, 1991). 21 See N. Duxbury,‘Why English Jurisprudence is Analytical’ (2004) 57 Current Legal Problems, pp. 1–51.
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