Dewigged, Bothered, & Bewildered: British Colonial Judges on Trial, 1800–1900 by John McLaren (review)

John McLaren’s Dewigged, Bothered, & Bewildered is a colourful comparative study of the contested boundaries between law and politics in the British Empire from 1800 to 1900.

McLaren’s book is primarily a work ofjudicial biography. Drawing on deep, multi-archival research spanning Barbados, British Guiana, the Cape Colony, Fiji, Grenada, Mauritius, the Leeward Islands, New South Wales, Nova Scotia, and Sierra Leone, McLaren uses the faltering careers of colonial judges “to explore not only their role in constructing and working with legal institutions and developing doctrine, but also their interaction with the societies in which they served” (6). By exploring the professional lives ofjudges who were disciplined, removed, and/or relocated, McLaren illuminates the legal and political mechanics of empire in context.

McLaren’s rogue judges are a mixed lot. Some got into trouble for their conservatism. Others were accused radicals and defenders of settlers (and sometimes convicts, slaves, and servants) against colonial despotism. Many were difficult men, struggling to maintain their status, their patronage networks, and their professionalism in a series of socially confined, multi-confessional, and institutionally compromised colonies. Most were trained in the tradition of judicial independence that had crystallized in the United Kingdom in the eighteenth century, yet all were expected to support, as well as to mitigate, flawed local institutions of government in an Empire drifting toward autocracy while still leery of its assertive white settler populations. In various ways, all of McLaren’s judges were mired in the politically fraught question of whether the rule of law, dispensed by a newly professionalized colonial judiciary, could operate both as a liberal defence against colonial tyranny and as a technology of imperial control over slave masters, emancipated slaves, convicts, and settlers in empire.

Dewigged, Bothered, & Bewildered thus contributes in important—if poorly articulated ways—to what has been called the new imperial history. Since Zoë Laidlaw’s and Alan Lester’s groundbreaking work on imperial networks, biography has been a key means for historians to understand the economic, affective, and bureaucratic strands that connected colonies laterally and bound them to the metropolis, particularly in the late Georgian and Victorian periods. Though McLaren pays far less attention to the family and confessional entanglements of his subjects than many historians of imperial networks, his judges are ideal case studies for this sort of history. Some of them were born in the colonies; all enjoyed and eventually lost metropolitan patronage; and many, like John Walpole Willis, John Gorrie, and George Smith, were shunted from post to post around the Empire, dragging their experience and legal ideology in their wake. McLaren’s careful unpacking, notjust of the judges’ law work but of their social failings and administrative intrigues, lays bare the messiness of imperial, constitutional politics in the Empire—messiness that necessitated and survived widespread imperial legal reform. Meanwhile, the sheer number of characters and colonies McLaren has researched here gives unprecedented empirical breadth to his history. Underneath McLaren’s detailed biographies lies a new history of the British Empire written on an archival scale that eclipses that of Helen Taft Manning’s and John Manning Ward’s ageing master works.

Unfortunately, McLaren’s big imperial story is often obscured by his modest pretensions. He situates his work squarely within a rather narrow tradition of comparative legal history emanating chiefly from law schools in Canada and Australia—indeed, the book was published under the auspices of the Francis Forbes and Osgoode Societies, which have both played an important role in developing that historiography. This body of work is rich and important: it has provided McLaren with both the context and the questions he needs to give a rich account of the constitutional complexities of rule of law disputes in a variety of colonies in the nineteenth-century British Empire. However, this history is simply not read by enough historians. McLaren would have done those working outside this field an enormous service...