Richard Price, in his concise assessment of the new imperial history, asserts that law remains one of the most prominent “blind spots” within it (“One Big Thing: Britain, Its Empire, and Their Imperial Culture,” Journal of British Studies 45, no. 3 [July 2006]: 607). With An Empire on Trial, Martin Wiener joins several other major scholars who have attempted to address this critical (although narrowing) gap in the historiographical record. Wiener deftly uses criminal law in the empire and the controversial trials for interracial murder as avenues to explore the dynamics of imperialism and the ideas and practices that linked the people of Britain's colonies to the political and legal institutions that comprised the empire's formal framework. The result is a complex, fascinating, and sometimes controversial book.

An Empire on Trial is a departure for Wiener, who has established himself as one of the premier scholars of British law and legal culture and the foremost scholar on murder but, until this point, had yet to take the imperial turn. What is particularly impressive about the author's approach to his new arena is his choice to examine the contest and conflicts surrounding interracial murder across a geographically and chronologically broad span. His analysis begins with interracial murder on British ships at sea in the mid-nineteenth century and ends with a brief chapter on the murder trial of Thurmann Grant, a lumber-mill owner accused of killing one of his black employees, which took place in British Honduras in 1934. Major chapters are devoted to Queensland (1869–89), Fiji (1857–85), Trinidad and the Bahamas (1886–97), and Kenya (1905–34), while India (1899–1922), because of the complexity of its legal system and its significance in the British Empire, is the subject of two chapters.

Although Wiener follows a contiguous and overlapping chronology across the book and does trace, when possible, the movement of specific legal policies and the officials who enforced them between different parts of the empire, both of these organizing elements are secondary. Rather, the disparate regions and periods addressed are forged into a cohesive whole through the focus on a single overriding question: “What in fact happened when the contrasting ‘principles’—of equality and liberalism on the one hand, and inequality and authoritarianism on the other—came into practical conflict?” (5). Power, ideology, discourse, and concrete manifestations (or visible absences) of commitment to “equal justice for all,” of authoritarian tendencies, of the debate over where to strike the balance between colonial self-determination and the maintenance of fair rule and public order, and of race and class bias in the trials, the verdicts, and the reactions to them are therefore at the center of his analysis. The author's primary assertion is that murder trials were a forum in which the multitude of ideologies, authorities, and interests pervading Britain's imperial project(s) were subjected to public scrutiny and debate. Each of these murder trials and the events surrounding them thus served as barometers of the fluctuating balance of power that existed between local elite interests in the colonies, the working- and middle-class white population, the authority of the Colonial Office and other metropolitan institutions, the discretion of judicial officials, and, in the case of India and Kenya, the growing political assertiveness of the indigenous populations.

Wiener wisely keeps his focus strictly on trials for one crime, murder, on the final stages of these trials in the high courts and only on those involving both Europeans and non-Europeans. The author also devotes the majority of the book to the social and political fractures between different European cohorts in the empire (e.g., civilian vs. military administrators, planters vs. governors, and judicial officials with varying local allegiances, legal priorities, professional goals, and ideological agendas) that were revealed through trials involving interracial violence. In most instances (although not with chaps. 5 and 6, which examine interracial murder in India), the author's choice to focus largely on internecine conflict among the colonizers means that race serves largely as a lens through which the complexities of imperial administration, law, and ideology are viewed, rather than as a specific subject of inquiry. Were this not the case, such a long time period and so wide a geographic scope might have proven untenable, and it is a testament to the author's deft handling of this breadth that only the chapter on Kenya, which covers nearly thirty years in thirty pages, and the brief concluding discussion of Honduras seem to be a bit thin.

Drawing largely from metropolitan archives, the author does an excellent job of putting each trial in its broader historical context and also skillfully traces the impact of these trials upon the political and legal balance of power among the cohorts involved. In his focus on the complex dynamics of particular trials, the multitude of perspectives involved, and the varied contexts and consequences of crimes, trials, and their verdicts, Wiener is explicitly contradicting many of the claims made by postcolonial scholars, such as Ranajit Guha, that law was merely a veil to disguise imperial exploitation (2). He also takes a strong stance against what he argues are the two most prominent narratives of empire, which portray it either as a grave injustice or as a positive force for reform and progress of colonized regions. There was no singular “imperial project,” he concludes, that was “good or evil,” but the empire was rather “a site of many simultaneous ‘projects,’ both worthy of celebration and indictment” (231).

In his attention to the complexities of imperialism and to the contested elements of its ideology, discourse, and practice, Wiener's approach is very much in accord with that of many imperial historians and postcolonial theorists. His assertions do conflict, however, with much of the recent scholarship on the centrality of racism in the dynamics of British imperialism. For this and several other reasons, An Empire on Trial is a book that will likely provoke much serious scholarly debate. From the broad reading audience that this engaging and fluidly composed book will undoubtedly attract, Wiener's argument that the “rule of law” was often profoundly unjust and could shield the perpetrators of violence and brutality from punishment will raise some eyebrows, albeit from those on the other side of the imperial-legal fence. The reception of the book for each reader will also depend on to what degree they accept the author's most basic assertions, which are that “law lay at the heart of the British imperial enterprise,” that “criminal justice was at the core of law,” and that murder trials in particular led to “moments of unusual illumination into the Empire's fundamental nature” (5)—in other words, that the most revealing element of the British Empire was its legal culture, that this culture revolved around issues of criminal rather than civil law, and that the most defining element of the former was found in its rarest and most extreme manifestations. But this is all to the good since any work of such contemporary significance, intellectual breadth, and analytical power inevitably leaves as many questions as it provides answers. And the central question of An Empire on Trial, how the “tension between liberal ideals and myths on the one hand, and the pressures and inducements of authoritarian rule on the other” was worked through in practice, is certainly one of the most significant, and most difficult, that can be asked in the current age.