Jack Jin Gary Lee is Assistant Professor of Sociology at The New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts. His scholarship explores how race and law shape the social logics and processes of governance in modern empires and (post)colonial states.

Gary’s projects and publications range across historical sociology, colonialism and empire, law and society, global health regulation, race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, and international migration. Together with Professor Lynette J. Chua, he co-edited Contagion, Technology and Law at the Limits (Hart Publishing). His recent article, “Racialized Legalities: The Rule of Law, Race, and the Protection of Women in Britain’s Crown Colonies 1886-1890,” in Law and Social Inquiry, was recognized with the 2024 Best Scholarly Article Award by the American Sociological Association’s Section on Global and Transnational Sociology.

As a GIDEST Faculty Fellow, Gary will continue work on his book project, Inventing Direct Rule, on the making of “direct rule” in the modern British Empire. His dissertation on this topic won the University of California, San Diego’s 2018 Chancellor’s Dissertation Medal (Social Sciences).

By 1865, officials in Britain’s Colonial Office and the governors of their colonies were at an impasse. Rocked by the Morant Bay rebellion in Jamaica and concerned with the growing reach of the Crown beyond the Atlantic, the leading men of an expansionary empire that spanned the West and East Indies found themselves on unfamiliar grounds. Confronted with growing non-white laboring populations, officials were no longer willing to grant representative institutions—i.e., legislative assemblies—to colonies where White settlers comprised small minorities. Instead, to govern such “plural societies,” they institutionalized a previously ad hoc form of colonial rule, Crown Colony government. In this authoritarian system, the Colonial Office, the ministry that managed Britain’s colonial empire, and the governor, in theory, exercised full powers over legislation and the administration of a colony, rejecting the need for the consent of the colonized. Crown Colony government enabled “direct rule”—a term that signified the centralized and unfettered exercise of sovereignty in an empire increasingly marked by difference. Connecting the laws and legalities that remade Jamaica and the Straits Settlements (Singapore, Penang, and Malacca) as Crown Colonies, Inventing Direct Rule, examines how Crown Colony government was imagined as a constitution of difference.