This interdisciplinary collection of sixteen essays grew out of a conference sponsored by the British Academy titled “Comparative Histories of Crime” held in Christchurch, New Zealand. According to the editors, Barry Godfrey and Graeme Dunstall, the primary theme of the book is “the transformation and convergence of criminal justice systems during a broad shift from legal pluralism to the hegemony of state law in the European world and beyond” (1). To this ambitious end, they have taken a distinctly comparative approach in assembling chapters on a wide range of thought-provoking topics relating to crime and “legal regimes” (to use Lauren Benton's term) throughout the mid-to-late British Empire. Apart from the geographic breadth of the essays, the editors stress the variety of methodological approaches employed by the contributors ranging from “global” analyses to highly localized case studies.

The first essay, by Clive Emsley, one of the leading historians of the English police, addresses changes in policing and penal policy in nineteenth-century Britain and continental Europe. By comparing the development of localized English urban and county policing and prisons to their centralized continental counterparts, Emsley complicates the predictable and, by now, overused metropole-colony trope prevalent in recent British imperial historiography. In fact, Britain's overseas expansion was merely one variant of empire, one in which the distinctions between mother country and colony, nation-state and empire, metropolis and periphery, and consensual rule and autocratic control were relatively sharp. Yet contemporaneous to Victorian Britain were the unabashedly imperial regimes of the Habsburgs, Hohenzollerns, and Napoleon III, who each developed their own models of empire with their attendant legal and policing structures where these same distinctions were blurred if not completely absent.

Subsequent chapters focus specifically on subjects within the British Empire and Commonwealth. John Pratt traces developments in the historiography of punishment from Radzinowicz's History of English Criminal Law (1948) to the writings of Foucault and more recent scholars. Mark Finnane addresses the controversial counterrevisionism of Keith Windschuttle regarding “crimes of violence” against Aborigines in the white settlement of Australia and Tasmania. Finnane especially takes issue with historical accounts that justify settler violence and land seizure as self-defense and, in any event, are seen as no worse than what indigenous communities would have suffered under any other rulers. Julie Evans also addresses the question of criminalization, rule of law, and Aborigines by focusing on the grounding of the transport vessel Maria in South Australia and the slaughter of shipwrecked survivors. At issue was the debate about the applicability of English law to the indigenous tribe thought responsible for the killings and the larger question of suspending ordinary due process and individual rights of criminal defendants for entire groups that had refused to submit to colonial authority. Mark Brown further unravels this peculiarly colonial notion of guilt by association in his chapter on the “criminal tribes” of north India. He argues that the exclusionary criminal tribes policy was less about public safety and more about government fear of transient subpopulations and the desire to force their settlement and put their labor to profitable use in the colonial enterprise. Dean Wilson addresses the “techno-scientific” symbolism of advances in urban policing in Melbourne from beat constable foot patrols to the deployment of advanced forensic investigation techniques and the use of wireless communication and motorized transportation. Stefan Petrow's interesting chapter on Tasmania describes how it was the only Australian colony to retain the distinctly English model of decentralized policing until the end of the nineteenth century. He argues that resistance to centralization owed not only to Tasmania's persistently low crime rate but to the power of local agricultural elites who dominated the colony's parliament and who were loath to surrender police power to a central authority. Barry Godfrey and Graeme Dunstall offer a comparison of the growth of crime and crime control in the frontier town of Timaru in Southern New Zealand and the boomtown of Crewe in the heart of Welsh coal country. Richard Hill's chapter returns to the subject of policing as he describes how Maori “native constables” were employed as colonial collaborators to pacify rival tribes (and themselves in the process) even as they tried to assert their rangatiratanga (autonomy) against settler encroachment. Jane Buckingham discusses the British legal response to sati (widow immolation) in early colonial India and argues that authorities were less likely to impose their own law and more willing to defer to Brahmanic custom and precedent regarding such a sensitive issue than recent historiography suggests. Helen Dampier shifts the focus to South Africa as she describes “everyday life” in Boer women's testimonies of concentration camps during the South African War. Finally, Jeremy Finn reviews the codification of criminal law in the Australasian parliaments.

Overall, this collection offers a wide range of compelling scholarship. The only criticism is that a few essays seem to wander away from the main theme of “crime and empire”—a problem not uncommon in edited collections arising from conference proceedings. For example, Wilson's essay on technology and policing in Melbourne, while well researched, is less about empire than about modern urban law enforcement. His conclusions might well be made about the police in London, New York, or Chicago. At the very least, it illustrates the ambivalent position of modern metropolises such as Melbourne, Toronto, or Sydney in the study of empire. On a similar note, Dampier's essay on Boer women internees is not about crime in the truest since British and Boer forces each openly acknowledged that they were involved in a full-scale military conflict rather than dealing with the problem of crime. Perhaps this episode might be considered, not unreasonably, as what we today call a “crime against humanity,” but apart from that, the essay fits awkwardly within the parameters set forth in the editors’ introduction. These are minor criticisms, however. One notable strength of this collection is its emphasis on Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific—regions of the empire that tend to receive relatively little scholarly attention compared with India and Africa. It also showcases the research of established and up-and-coming scholars from these regions. The book as a whole is a fine addition to the growing body of scholarship on criminology, penology, and policing in the British Empire and should be of considerable interest to scholars in various disciplines.