An Empire on Trial: Race, Murder, and Justice under British Rule, 1870–1935 (review)

An Empire on Trial, as the author states, “takes one issue—interpersonal interracial homicide—and seeks to follow, through a broad range of imperial contexts, how it was dealt with and what that ‘dealing with’ reveals about the nature of the British Empire at the height of its power” (ix). In almost every one of the fascinating (and often shocking) cases referred to in this prodigiously researched book, the term “interracial homicide” actually denotes the killing of dark-skinned men or women by white men. In mustering examples from almost every quarter of the British Empire during the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Wiener seeks to explore how, in coping with the legal consequences of these killings, “the liberalism so strong in modern Britain was to be reconciled with the imperial rule of non-Britons” (ix). In so doing Wiener seeks to “move beyond the increasingly sterile debate between ‘celebratory’ and ‘accusatory’ histories of the Empire” (x). In its place he wants to undertake a more dispassionate study of the “complexities” of power relations in the Empire, more particularly of the complex interaction in the late British Empire of stark racial inequality and the “deeprooted liberal premises of the criminal law” (x).

Wiener’s methodology is to use a set of multicolonial case studies in interracial homicide to determine whether in administering the Empire the British ruling class evinced a “meaningful” commitment to the “rule of the law” (2). The author’s premise is that a “meaningful” commitment to the rule of law would be manifest in the willingness of colonial and imperial officials to prosecute and punish whites for the killing of blacks. On these criteria, were British authorities in fact committed to the rule of law in cases of interracial homicide? On this crucial issue, Wiener’s thesis is equivocal. In his view, the data neither vindicate nor indict British pretensions about the rule of law. Criminal law was both a mechanism of power and a means of ameliorating it. As Wiener summarizes, the British Empire was “more complex and divided than some have made it out to be” (xi).

There is a great deal to be admired in An Empire on Trial. The case studies— drawn from legal and newspaper reports of homicides on the high seas, in Queensland, Fiji, Trinidad, the Bahamas, India, Kenya, and British Honduras—are intensively researched and vividly described. They contain stories of violence callous and horrific enough to give pause to the sturdiest reader. Almost invariably the most heinous homicides were perpetrated by white settlers. In Queensland during the 1870s gangs of settlers rounded up aboriginals for forced labor and, not infrequently, shot or beat to death those who deigned to resist. In Fiji an escaped native indentured servant was apprehended, bound, and viciously beaten and then left uncared for overnight to “die like a dog” (83). The shooting, beating, and stabbing to death of Indians by white planters, soldiers, and policemen of the Raj were commonplace. The narrative acuity of the case studies is underpinned by the mastery of a wide range of source materials including case reports, colonial and British newspaper accounts, the debates of legislators and parliamentarians, and a thorough canvassing of colonial and imperial public records.

A rough pattern can be discerned in the cases discussed. When a settler committed interracial homicide, and when that homicide was brought to the attention of the authorities in the form of a criminal complaint, in virtually every case colonial officials activated the criminal justice system with a willingness to prosecute and punish. British colonial judges (most were London-trained barristers appointed by the imperial authorities in London) were generally willing—and some were positively keen—to oversee trials and charge juries in a manner that might lead to conviction and punishment. Convictions occasionally were registered, and even when they...