Alastair McClure is a legal historian of modern South Asia and the British Empire with research interests that include the history of criminal law, state violence, and migration. His first book project, Trials of Sovereignty: Mercy, Violence and the Making of Criminal Law in British India, 1857-1922, was published with Studies in Legal History, Cambridge University Press. It offers the first detailed study of the role played by mercy and discretionary justice in the construction of India’s modern political and legal order in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. His other recent publications have included studies of legal aid, corporal and capital punishment, and censorship. Forthcoming articles track wide-ranging debates between the Qing, Ottoman and British Empires that arose from campaigns of deportation and repatriation in highly contested imperial spaces such as Aden, Port Said, Bombay, Hong Kong and Shanghai.

He is currently working on two new projects. The first focuses on the history of legal aid, the development of the criminal trial, and under-trial detention in colonial South Asia. The second traces the five-hundred year history of indemnity acts and ordinances deployed across the British Empire following periods of martial law and rebellion. He also serves as the associate editor of Law and History Review and the co-convenor of the Asian Legal History Seminar Series at HKU.