This book offers a panoramic and multilayered visual tour of Hong Kong's legal history from its colonial beginnings to the twenty-first century. May Holdsworth and Christopher Munn, two historians whose previous collaboration yielded the encyclopedic Dictionary of Hong Kong Biography, bring their wealth of expertise and knowledge to an important and timely subject. The book is thoroughly researched and beautifully illustrated with hundreds of images curated from dozens of galleries, museums, and personal collections across the world, many of which have not been published before. It is at once a work of meticulous research relished by academics and an attractive pastime for the casual reader.

Crime, Justice and Punishment in Colonial Hong Kong dissects one of the most fraught subjects in the city's history, with a sharp, unstinting prose style and keen attention to the full complexity and irony of the colony's history of policing. It fills a critical and timely need in light of the civil unrest, police brutality, and controversies over the city's justice system in recent years. The field of law and justice in Hong Kong was long dominated by the perspectives of colonial administrators, and more recent works have tended to either adopt much narrower time frames or focus on particular events. Holdsworth and Munn take a bird's-eye view of the entire complex of the city's criminal justice system and treat the police, the courts, and the prisons as separate but interlocking entities to highlight the hidden connections and deeper dynamics at play. The book delivers a powerful reminder that Hong Kong at its core was, and still is, “one of the most heavily policed cities in the world” (p. 35). Its police station complex was a testimony to the “fraught encounter between the law on the one hand, and ordinary people on the streets on the other” (p. 14).

The book is divided into three parts, each reflected in one of the key words in the title (crime, justice, and punishment), with a corresponding focus on the Central Police Station, the Central Magistry, and the Victoria Gaol. Chapters within each part cover the architectural designs and physical developments of the sites, the functions and historical evolutions of each component, the stories of the people who staffed the offices, and thematic explorations and case studies.

Part one narrates the history of crime fighting, the development of police institutions, and the challenges of peacekeeping due to the colony's divided authorities, colonial insecurity, police corruption, and racial tension both inside the police force and between the Chinese and the colonizers. In a striking parallel with today's Hong Kong, where the police forces are often drawn from the mainland, we are reminded that from its early history, the Hong Kong Police adopted a policy of rule by “strangers,” a conscious strategy to keep its police separate from the native populations.

The three chapters in part two deal with the Central Magistry—its architectural history, the evolution of the magistrate's jurisdiction, and what the crimes tell us about Hong Kong's social and economic changes. Of particular interest is chapter 6, in which Holdsworth and Munn zoom in on one representative case study per decade to illustrate how crimes and the magistrate's sentencing changed from the 1840s to the 1940s. It reveals that many cases were connected to the corruption and malfunction of the colonial administration itself and the deeper class and race-based conflicts embedded in the city's colonial history.

Part three, on the Victoria Gaol, reveals the failures, limitations, and inadequacies of the prison system and the harrowing experience of the imprisoned.

One of the most exciting features of the book is its attention to the interrelations between the material and the intangible dimensions of the city's criminal justice system. The chapters on the construction, architectural philosophies, and inner designs of the complexes bring into conversation scholars working on heritage preservation, art and archival history, and legal and colonial history—in fact, a few chapters were cowritten with architects. This type of interdisciplinary collaboration can be time-consuming and painstaking to coordinate, as the cross-pollination of ideas requires a slower, deliberate pace. But the book, as a result, also speaks to a more varied and expanded readership. These chapters exemplify the kind of productive labor scholars need in the face of historical amnesia and specialized insularity increasingly seen in higher education.

Another contribution of the book is that it offers a sober account of the reality of the criminal justice system in Hong Kong's history. In contrast with the often romanticized depictions of Hong Kong as a beacon of liberty, the book demonstrates that tension between state and society ran deep throughout the colonial period, and a heavy use of police for crackdown, surveillance, and censorship was a regular feature of law enforcement. Despite Holdsworth and Munn's critical lenses, their analysis is driven by empirical evidence. The book does not offer sweeping generalizations, nor does it appear to be driven by any larger ideological agenda. Readers will likely be able to draw their own conclusions from the book's numerous case studies, visual materials, and original quotes as they see fit.

In all, Crime, Justice and Punishment in Colonial Hong Kong is a highly readable, versatile, and thought-provoking book. I recommend it to all interested in the history of Hong Kong and its relation to modern China, as well as the larger field of law and empire.