Borderline Crime: Fugitive Criminals and the Challenge of the Border, 1819-1914 by Bradley Miller (review)

Through the lens of migrations across the long North American border, Borderline Crime: Fugitive Criminals and the Challenge of the Border makes important contributions to the history of crime, international relations, and law-making. This is a scholarly, closely argued book, but it will have appeal to a wide audience. Bradley Miller illustrates his themes with engaging and entertaining examples and writes clearly and concisely.

Miller makes three central arguments throughout the book. First, he asserts that the long international boundary, by limiting the reach of domestic law, "posed an everyday challenge to the rule of law in northern North America"; such challenges were neither remote nor theoretical. Territorial notions of sovereignty were crystallizing during this period, but such notions not only empowered the state domestically but also "humbled and undermined" authority in a context in which people readily crossed borders, creating sanctuaries for international fugitives. Miller illustrates this theme through detailed discussions of extradition debates, including those regarding fugitive slaves, using a wide range of documents beyond the usual case law and diplomatic correspondence, "including police reports, consuls' dispatches, and newspaper reports." He tells fascinating stories of kidnappings by police on both sides of the border; while law enforcement often cooperated across the border, informality and lack of due process could lead not only to the release of a prisoner but also, on occasion, to the punishment of kidnappers.

Second, Miller argues that legal regimes have operated in ongoing uncertainty throughout this period, frustrated both by doctrinal doubt and divisions and inter-governmental politics. Perhaps most importantly, Canadian officials were repeatedly frustrated by the refusal of British imperial governments to expand the law of extradition, which included very few extraditable offences. Miller illustrates that Britain "touted itself and its empire as a special haven for oppressed people," including political refugees. Moreover, the law of asylum was repeatedly invoked to defend fugitive slaves. Yet British North American officials, confronted daily with the reality of fugitive criminals, were "deeply wary" of asylum, resulting in decades of "legal amorphousness." Finally, Miller argues that legal actors, both colonial and Canadian diplomats seeking extradition reform, and judges and police officers dealing with cross-border crimes, "embodied an enduring belief in supranational justice." That is, they believed states were obliged to work together to fulfill their sovereign obligation of maintaining order. Throughout, Miller uses American as well as colonial and Canadian sources, challenging previous depictions of American policy as "unilateralist and quasi-imperialist," and highlighting instead considerable cooperation, despite legal uncertainty, and potential diplomatic flare-ups over particularly sensitive cases.

Miller tells a complicated story of often contradictory approaches to sovereignty and extradition; ultimately, he argues that border issues, "the literal margins of British North America/Canada," were in fact central to the development of legal values and that the border "should be relocated" to the centre of historical inquiry with regard to law and politics. This reader cannot help but agree. Borderline Crime should become required reading in colonial, early Canadian, and North American international and diplomatic history.