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Reviewed by:
  • Colonial Justice: Justice, Morality, and Crime in the Niagara District, 1791–1849
  • James H. Warren
Colonial Justice: Justice, Morality, and Crime in the Niagara District, 1791–1849. By David Murray. Toronto: The Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History, 2002.

The law has proven to be a significant portal into the history of colonialism. On the one hand, its institutions produced rich archives, furnishing evidence for studies of family, reproduction, sexuality, citizenship, labor, migration, and slavery. On the other hand, it functions as a site of analysis in its own right, a site at which to study the instrumentalities of colonial authority precisely as they negotiated their own existence and insertion into the lives they governed. Colonial law was one of those dense transfer points where power was exercised and knowledge—about sexuality, gender, race, morality, authority, humanity, modernity, bodies—was produced; this knowledge prized open a subject population to objectification and made it available for governing. It is thus a discursive location which historians are able to mine in order to historicize voice, agency, archive, the performances of authority and resistance, affect, hybridity, and the policing of the social body. In Colonial Justice: Justice, Morality, and Crime in the Niagara District, 1791–1849, David Murray evaluates the system of criminal justice in Upper Canada in the period between the colony’s foundation and the reassignment of legal jurisdiction from districts to cities and counties. He focuses on the three themes, or principles, of good government put forward by the colony’s first lieutenant governor, John Graves Simcoe, in 1792 and 1793: public justice, Christian morality, and the punishment of crime. Justice, morality, and crime were thought to form the basis for a successful, prosperous, and felicitous colony. Murray traces these themes through the records of the courts of quarter sessions, run by local magistrates and rooted in the local community. Building on Clifford Geertz’s argument that the law works “by the light of local knowledge,” Murray argues that an “understanding how the legal process functioned on a local level can shed new light on the administration of British colonial law” (5). He contends that this approach will offer two substantial revisions to the historiography on law in early Upper Canada: first, that juridical power was not subject to corruption and impartiality, but rather “dealt fairly and humanely” with ordinary persons (6); second, that colonial law in Upper Canada was far from a hegemonic, “monolithic and repressive system of justice” (7).

Colonial Justice is structured according to the three overarching themes, each addressed in multi-chapter parts. The first chapter, which exists outside of the thematic structure, contextualizes Upper Canada and posits the Niagara district as a frontier society, a fluid political, economic, and cultural boundary between the British colony and the young American nation. In part I, “Justice,” Murray explores the offices and officers of the district justice system. In two chapters the author introduces the reader to magistrates, sheriffs, jurors, and constables—the system’s representatives to the community and, just as importantly, the community’s representatives in the system. Here, the author is able to situate the local networks though which justice operated and to demonstrate the complexity of the system.

In the second part, “Morality,” Murray suggests that concerns about Sabbath-breaking (chapter 4), the treatment of lunatics (chapter 5), and social welfare (chapter 6), as they were addressed in the courts of quarter sessions, indicate that the law codified and expressed Christian morality even as conceptions of morality changed. Murray simply takes this expression as proof of the fair and humane treatment of persons. It is unfortunate that Murray not only declined to use this opportunity to analyze the culture of such a moral order, but also failed to interrogate the justice system as a site in which knowledge—equal in billing to the “local” in Geertz’s assessment of how law operated—about the “insane” or “paupers” was produced and mobilized within this local economy of colonial governance.

In the last section, “Crime,” Murray attempts to measure crime in the colonial period and to determine whether it posed a threat to the moral order of society. In the last two decades of...

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