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

Bradley Miller’s Borderline Crime: Fugitive Criminals and the Challenge of the Border, 1819–1914 is a welcome addition to the growing body of scholarship on the history of borders and national sovereignty. Miller’s work—which was published through the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History—is especially welcome now, amid increasing global conflict over issues of migrants, refugees, fugitives, and national borders. For readers of Victorian Studies, Borderline Crime will be most engaging due to its placement of the border between British North America/Canada and the United States in an imperial context. Miller examines the border not only as a physical space, but also as a highly contested legal idea that created tension between the British imperial and Canadian governments, as much as between those of Canada and the United States.

Borderline Crime explores “how law reacted to [the] challenge of the border” in northern North America, and how small, everyday incidents at that border contributed to “a century-long era of law formation” (4). Miller grounds this investigation of borderlands law in extradition cases, looking at when and how fugitive criminals crossing the border between Canada and the United States were or were not returned to the jurisdiction in which they had committed a crime. He uses these cases to argue that international boundaries limited the reach of domestic law and “posed an everyday challenge to the rule of law,” that the legal regimes created to deal with crime at the border were “fragile,” and that Canadian legal thought around the border increasingly relied on the idea that “states were obliged to work together to combat the migration of crime” and maintain an international legal order (5, 6, 7).

The book is divided into seven chapters. Following the introduction, chapter 2 explores the use of the border by criminals to escape justice, which undermined state authority on both sides. In chapter 3, Miller examines the rise of a solution to that problem: the abduction of fugitives by “community members, police officers,” and others to create a local, transnational response to crime outside of formal extradition law (13). This, of course, created many legal challenges on both sides of the border, and so chapter 4 investigates the ways in which policy-makers struggled to adapt formal extradition law to the everyday realities at the border (and the initial failure of most of these policies).

Chapter 5 departs slightly from the narrative of legal construction at the border at different levels, and instead focuses on Canadian responses to fugitive slaves during the U.S. Civil War era. This chapter will be of particular relevance to Victorianists, as it places the fugitive slave question in the context of the British Empire. Miller examines the ways in which British rhetoric and tradition about granting asylum collided with a government in British North America reluctant to write asylum status for refugees into law. This was due to the concerns that such a legal codification would damage international relations with the United States. The disconnection between settler colony and empire led to a “tension between [the] two coexisting realities” of British imperial rhetoric and Canadian realities, which created “decades of legal amorphousness” (117).

Chapter 6 returns to the narrative of U.S. and Canadian lawmakers attempting to clarify and codify Canadian-American extradition, detailing later successes in contrast to chapter 4. Finally, chapter 7 concludes the study by placing Miller’s argument within the broader context of the British world. It is another important chapter that broadens the scope of Miller’s argument beyond simply the U.S./Canada relationship or the local case studies he uses as evidence. It places both the United States and Canada within a legal history of the “common law world” and argues that there was in fact great diversity of thought within this shared tradition, and that “the challenge of borders was felt around the globe, but...