Many eighteenth-century theorists of common law attributed its legitimacy in part to its connection to a particular location and history. However, as Britain incorporated Scotland and expanded its imperial reach abroad, British governors often attempted to carry common-law practices to new locations. In his fiction and nonfiction, Sir Walter Scott advocates maintaining Scotland’s common-law system but worries that the very cultural and legal distinctiveness he demands for Scotland prevents Scots from receiving justice under British law. Portraying the consequences of the Norman conquest in Ivanhoe (1819) and internal and external colonialism in Chronicles of the Canongate (1827), Scott demonstrates the difficulties of reconciling the role of custom in common law’s legitimacy with a centralizing imperial state. In both works, the victors’ biases toward their own law mean that history and historical fiction no longer suture past and present, and that law imposes tragedy as well as order.

In The Slave, Grace (1827), William Scott, Lord Stowell, Chief Justice of the High Court of Admiralty, ruled that although Grace James, an enslaved Antiguan woman, had been free during her 1822–23 residence in England with the family she served, she reverted to her enslaved status after returning to Antigua. This chapter examines James’s efforts to obtain her freedom by surrendering herself to Antigua customs officers as contraband under the slave trade abolition statutes. It considers how her claims were contested in the Antigua courts and supported by abolitionist lawyers in London. The chapter also shows how satirical newspaper editorials in response to Stowell’s ruling undermined the legitimacy of slavery. It concludes by examining how Mary Prince, who was effectively exiled in London by Stowell’s ruling, likewise used satire and knowing irony in The History of Mary Prince (1831) to expose the inconsistencies and contradictions of the law of slavery and freedom in the British Empire.

The conclusion summarises the main findings of the book and tentatively goes beyond them. When it comes to thought and practice of fin-de-siècle colonial war and violence, we should emphasise essential comparability and connectivity instead of national particularities among the British, German and Dutch empires. It is suggested this research finding might apply to other Western colonial empires as well. At the same time, a number of smaller aspects in which we might actually find national differences is noted. Taking up the transimperial mobility of ideas and experiences of colonial warfare noted throughout the book, the conclusion then asks what questions these findings raise for thinking about the temporality and spatiality of empires more generally. Finally, it touches on continuities in war and violence beyond 1914, both in later colonial wars as well as in the fighting of the First World War in Europe. It tentatively suggests that continuities were considerable in the first case and much lower in the second case.

Discussing the historiography, this section posits the need to move away from national-exceptionalist theories of colonial violence and the military-historical search for national doctrines of colonial warfare, instead recognising the extreme violence of fin-de-siècle colonial wars as part of a transimperial Colonial Way of War. Research should take into view several empires and the shared thought behind such violence. Europeans racialised colonial warfare and infused it with performative aims and imperial anxieties. Such racialised notions eventually became more important than structural constraints in determining extreme colonial violence. Cross-imperial connectivity explains the highly transimperial character of this knowledge, a connectivity that rested mainly on human, colony-to-colony mobility and on transnational colonial populations. Researching this requires rethinking ideas of imperial networks and reservoirs of knowledge. The introduction also offers definitions of ‘knowledge’ in relation to colonial warfare and of ‘extreme’ violence (arguing that there was a qualitative difference between colonial and ‘European’ wars at the time) and discusses sources and periodisation.

A constructed racial otherness of the enemy distinguished colonial warfare from other modes of fin-de-siècle warfare, while it constituted at the same time a unifying element across different empires. It gave rise to a general culture of permissiveness and the fashioning of an imagined ‘native mind’, two preconditions for a specific body of knowledge on colonial warfare to emerge. This featured specific prescriptions as to what colonial warfare was to do, denoted here as the five ‘basic imperatives’: colonial warfare had to generate a ‘moral effect’ on the opponent, it had to be ‘bold and offensive’, it had to create a ‘lasting peace’ by using heavy force first, it had to ‘punish’ and, increasingly, it had to produce high death tolls (the ‘big bag’). The chapter explains how all these imperatives pushed towards extreme violence and demonstrates how all were present in very similar forms in the British, German and Dutch empires. For each, the origins, development and empire-specific appearance are discussed. With a transimperial corpus of colonial manuals as main source base, it is also shown that there was a further convergence in this body of knowledge around 1900.

Chapter 3 addresses British and French involvement in the decolonisation of the case study territories. It assesses the differing approaches of colonial representatives towards the political status of the territories. This includes measures taken to repress anticolonial protests and activists, the Gallicisation of Guadeloupe and Martinique after departmentalisation and the impact of years of chronic underfunding. This chapter places these territories within the wider context of the decolonisation of the British and French Empires. It argues that colonial pressures prevented a fair and open debate on the question of independence in these territories.

This chapter makes a case for rethinking the early history of colonial Hong Kong – for seeing the young colony as an ambiguous juridical space, shaped and bounded by inchoate ideas of extradition. History has forgotten this feature of early Hong Kong because most studies have assumed, anachronistically, that the Opium War treaties of 1842–43 instituted ‘extradition’ between Hong Kong and China, in addition to British ‘extraterritoriality’ in China. In fact, these ideas took time to crystallise from fuzzier arrangements for dividing jurisdiction. This jurisdictional ambiguity coincided with the belated rise of territorial thinking in the British Empire. It also coincided with ongoing developments in the British approach to surrendering fugitives to foreign states – a procedure that legal actors were only starting to refer to as ‘extradition’. So, historicising the idea of extradition allows us to understand how British actors perceived their practices in Hong Kong and China in comparison to their practices elsewhere. This perspective reveals that the imperial origins of extradition involved crucial experiments in the colonial ordering of territory, people, and executive power.

Chapter 1 recounts some of the main events of Jamaica’s 1865 Morant Bay rebellion. Compared to other historical reconstructions, the chapter emphasizes the influence of the end of the American Civil War and debates about Reconstruction on the rebellion and its coverage in the press. The chapter offers a basic narrative framework within which to understand the arguments presented in Chapters 2 through 6.

The Conclusion summarizes the book’s arguments and contextualizes them within broader patterns of public discourse in which Jamaica was conceptualized as especially revealing about race, and in which biblical slogans were used to encode universal claims about race. The conclusion analyzes a speech given by English lawyer and politician Charles Savile Roundell, who had served as secretary to the Royal Commission of Inquiry appointed to investigate Jamaica’s 1865 Morant Bay rebellion. Addressing the Tenth Annual Meeting of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science, held in Manchester, England, Roundell proposed taking Jamaica as a crucial instance, a term taken from Francis Bacon’s program for a new scientific method. And he cited the Bible as he made claims about how the races could and should relate to one another.

The Introduction frames the book’s argument by analyzing coverage of Jamaica’s 1865 Morant Bay rebellion in the American Missionary (New York), published by the American Missionary Association. The editors invoked Ecclesiastes 7:7, “Surely oppression maketh a wise man mad,” to blame Jamaica’s largely White plantocracy for pushing Black laborers to breaking point. They drew out the implications of this lesson on race for the United States – White Americans who had participated in the system of slavery should not be entrusted with safeguarding the rights of free Black citizens. This book shows how Jamaicans, Britons, and Americans understood Jamaica as a prime example, a test case that shed light on great questions about race and race relations occupying the Atlantic world at the end of the American Civil War. It argues that they used biblical slogans to encode a wide variety of claims about race and race relations. This Introduction relates the book’s argument to work by historians on Jamaica, the British Empire, and abolitionism, on the one hand, and work by biblical and religious studies scholars on the Bible and race, on the other.