In this compelling account of the quotidian violence of British rule in India, Elizabeth Kolsky seeks to restore physical force to the core of the colonial encounter, bringing the “painful bodily experience of the Raj back into view” (8). In her view, these episodes of violence committed by white planters, seamen, and soldiers were neither exceptional nor an epiphenomenal sideshow to the main stage of Pax Britannica but rather were integral to the composition of the colonial state. For, according to Kolsky, “although colonial law did not exactly produce white violence, it did not effectively prohibit it either” (23). Thus, she argues, colonial law served as an accomplice to violence, even as the regulation of this violence offered the state a pretext on which to expand.

Kolsky offers a vivid and often very moving narrative of the tortures that whites in India inflicted. She powerfully conveys a sense of the persistent routinization of colonialism's violence, even as other aspects of colonial rule ebbed and flowed. Furthermore, she offers insight into the often forgotten “non-officials” in India, whose misbehaviors provided a constant source of anxiety for both the East India Company and, later, the government of India. She depicts the struggles between different white populations as one of the factors that shaped the colonial state and its mechanics of settlement.

There is some slippage here, in that many of Kolsky's cases involve soldiers, who bore a distinctive relationship to officialdom. It is not always clear that the main division is between official and nonofficial Europeans, and the relationship between different types of violence might bear closer examination. In particular, one wonders about the relationship between the violence of the everyday and the state-sponsored forms of violence that were equally integral to colonial rule. What, precisely, was the connection (or disjunction) between ordinary and exceptional violence? Between the violence of the “wrong sort” of Europeans and the violence of the state itself? Was the colonial state disquieted by this violence because it seemed too much like its own, or not enough?

The book is structured so that Kolsky moves between the narrative of white violence and a detailed account of the legal construction of racial difference in India. Thus, the gorier tales of white violence are interspersed with the calmer, but sometimes equally deadly, domain of law. Kolsky aims to show how law and violence worked in tandem to deprive Indians of their rights and sometimes their lives. As she notes, codification in India posed important dilemmas in that by placing colonizers and colonized on equal legal footing, it threatened to upend colonialism's fundamentally unequal politics. She explores the long history of the making of the “European British subject” as a distinctive category within criminal law, arguing that the law protected and normalized white violence by offering most Europeans in India special legal protections.

In one fascinating example of how colonial officials vacillated on the question of whether people should be tried by members of their own race, Kolsky details how Bombay High Court Justice John Bucknell cited a case from the Straits Settlements that involved “a Danish subject who was knocked down with his motor bicycle and killed a Japanese sailor; he was arrested by a Sikh policeman, committed for trial by a West Indian Negro, prosecuted by an Armenian before a jury consisting of two Englishmen, two Chinese, one American, one Eurasian, and one Russian Jew, and was tried before a High Court Judge who was a Ceylon Burger’” (105). The Dane was acquitted, which Bucknell seemed to take as proof that simple assumptions about race and justice required rethinking.

Kolsky's narrative about white violence and her arguments about colonial justice come together most forcefully in her chapter on medical evidence. As Kolsky notes, “ideas about Indian people, bodies, and culture produced a medico-legal literature grounded in an ethnographic idiom that contradicted the claims of an objective scientific method” (110). Medical evidence about the “fragility” of Indian bodies was frequently deployed in order to support the legal immunity of white Britons to prosecution for Indian deaths. At the same time, the development of various “truth-technologies” designed to elicit reliable evidence from purportedly mendacious Indians made it more difficult for Indians to participate equally in the legal process.

Other chapters usefully zero in on particular locales of violence, such as the tea plantations of Assam, and explore the response of the Indian press and Indian nationalists to white violence. It would have been interesting in the latter chapter to hear more about how the colonial state sought to restrain this media coverage, for example, through libel or sedition charges. She somewhat overstates the case that the ordinary violence of empire has been ignored by historians; her own case studies could be helpfully situated within the larger history of human rights and empire and the vexed relationship between them. One thinks here not only of the aborigines in Australia, whom Kolsky mentions briefly, but also of recent scholarship on British rule in Kenya.

The book is at its best in starkly portraying the bodily clashes between colonizer and colonized. In this vitally important undertaking, Kolsky excels. Her conclusion—“whether the promise of colonial justice ultimately softened or hardened the practice of colonial power, I leave it to the reader to determine” (233)—is not entirely satisfying, and readers might have appreciated a stronger sense of change over time, as the study extends from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century. But if the horrifying cases that she details can occasionally become relentless, then this seems appropriate to her powerful central argument that one of the many tragic elements of the violence of empire was that it only ever offered more of the same.