Historians of European empires have tended to absorb the subject of white violence into a narrative about colonial repression without probing the origins, scope, or effects of this history. Elizabeth Kolsky's welcome study, Colonial Justice in British India, of the phenomenon in colonial India establishes everyday violence as an important topic of separate and sustained analysis. Her book adds a significant chapter to the historiography on crime in empire.

Kolsky argues that white violence was simultaneously a crucial support for colonial rule and a potentially destabilizing force. The failure of colonial courts to hold European British subjects accountable for violent crimes contrasted with claims about the virtues of British-installed rule of law. The need to control unruly Britons—who composed what Kolsky calls “the third face of colonialism”—ultimately served as a rationale for expanding the reach of British authority (5).

The book's methodological premise is that small acts of violence, and the trials that brought them attention, sustained colonialism and were collectively more important than the prominent violent encounters historians have regarded as turning points in British rule in India. A consistent claim of the book is that the violence crystallized racial categories, especially by defining and protecting the value of whiteness.

Kolsky has carefully mined a fascinating set of documents. She traces the anomalous treatment of nonofficial Europeans under East India Company rule and shows that they were not fully under anyone's jurisdiction in the interior districts. The result was a spree of misconduct, theft, and violence, enough to fill a twenty-five-volume collection compiled by Company officials. Kolsky draws effectively on this and other sources to document the disorder and to show that British officials considered it a serious problem.

In a compelling chapter on codification, Kolsky analyzes the fraught attempts to alter the criminal jurisdiction of district courts and argues that the goal of controlling white criminality informed the movement for codification. Other chapters explore British representations of Indians as perfidious witnesses whose testimony had to be weighed differently; the violence of Assam tea planters; and the relation between increasing leniency toward white criminals and anti-imperialist sentiment.

Kolsky makes the most of an “abundance of archival evidence” about white violence that has been insufficiently examined by historians (205). Every chapter offers newly mined accounts of acts of brutality and of the failed efforts to punish the perpetrators. The book is thoroughly convincing in showing the significance within Indian legal politics of white criminality, and in this regard, it marks a valuable contribution to Indian legal history and to colonial legal history more broadly.

Given the book's achievements, Kolsky can perhaps be forgiven for occasionally overreaching in representing white violence as not just an important problem but as the defining challenge of the legal order. Kolsky claims, for example, that “the menace of European misconduct … stood at the center of the case of codifying the law” (72). But she does not give sustained attention to other factors, including the global codification movement and jurisdictional tensions encompassing Indians. Religious influences on the law also get short shrift.

Two of the book's main themes, race and lawlessness, come in and out of focus. Kolsky's emphasis on racial categorization as a product of law allows her to escape the tendency of some scholars to reify race in analyzing colonial culture. And there is an insightful section on the relevance of the discourse of slavery and race in the West Indies for legal debates in India. But at times Kolsky's analysis moves too quickly, and without full explanation, from law to race. For example, she notes that the categories of Company servant and British subject, key jurisdictional markers, were not synonymous with whiteness, yet we tend to lose sight of the ambiguities of these categories as Kolsky hastens to conclude that the legal conflicts surrounding colonial violence solidified definitions of whiteness.

Similarly, Kolsky may embrace too readily the notion that failure to punish whites created a zone of “lawlessness” within the empire. Citing Agamben, Kolsky labels the violence as marking an “absence of law” (30). Yet most of her evidence points in the opposite direction, toward the view that the legal order tolerated and even cultivated the violence of nonofficial Europeans. Kolsky notes precisely this tendency of the legal order itself to create “spaces of violence and criminal opportunity” (35). Her clarity on this point in some places makes the choice of terms like “lawlessness” and “legal void” all the more puzzling.

There is no question that Kolsky succeeds admirably in connecting white criminality to the core subjects of colonial history, including ideologies of rule, the lived experience of colonial conflicts, and the discourses of anticolonial movements. The acts of violence she studies emerge not merely as chilling reminders of colonialism's cruelty but also as an integral and important force within colonial legal politics.