Since the end of the cold war, we have been witnessing a renewed appeal to liberal legalities reconstituted as critical means challenging illiberal forms of power. The reasons aside, this renewed appeal, in many of its instances, produces an effect of a theoretical separation between liberal law, on the one hand, and the illiberal (imperial and national) power to be challenged, on the other. A Jurisprudence of Power challenges this perceived oppositional relation by narrating a rich history in which liberal law and violent imperial forms of legal ordering were intertwined and negotiated in relation to each other. Specifically, the book focuses on the conflict that arose in Victorian England over the suppression of the Morant Bay uprising in Jamaica in October 1865. Black men and women rebelled against colonial authorities by burning the courthouse and killing eighteen persons, most of whom were white. In response, the English governor of Jamaica proclaimed martial law and deployed soldiers and militia to suppress the insurrection, which they did by killing and torturing hundreds of black Jamaicans.

A Jurisprudence of Power is concerned not with the insurrection itself, but with the controversy that ensued in England over the legality of the violent suppression and, specifically, the employment of martial law—how the liberal and secular sensibilities that the English political class had about legality were operative not to challenge colonization, but to constitute its legitimate means of law and violence. Unlike some critical theorists of law, however, who attempt to theorize spaces of indistinction between emergency powers and the rule of law, Rande W. Kostal's narrative stays clear of an excessive theoretical account that collapses liberal law into its supposed others. Instead, and following E. P Thompson, in The Poverty of Theory (New York, 1978) as well as Whigs and Hunters (London, 1975), Kostal offers a detailed historical narrative of the complex relation between liberal rule and empire. It was over the question of martial law, as well as the limits of its violence, that the terms of this relation came to be negotiated. By joining them together, martial law also revealed the tension between the two.

The book makes a few arguments: First, legal language, meaning, and procedure dominated the political controversy over the Jamaica affair. Second, secular law shaped the sense of morality that the English political class cultivated in negotiating their imperial expansions. This morality was not concerned with the suffering of the colonized, but with a sense of English civility. Third, the “legalization” of the Jamaica affair resulted not only in the translation of one political reality into another, legal one, but in its reconstruction. Specifically, the Jamaica affair came to be understood as raising questions about the exercise of political and military powers, not the conditions of colonization. Fourth, by the end of the Jamaica controversy, the law of martial law (whether it was instance of common law, its suspension, or its lawless other) still lacked cohesiveness.

The first chapter traces how the English political class reconstructed the suppression of the insurrection as an issue of constitutional law, specifically, as a question about the legal boundaries of legitimate state violence. The second chapter documents the investigations and litigations that ensued in Jamaica. The lawyer-led investigation, although it revealed the structural suffering that colonization engendered, resulted in legalized recommendations that focused on the criminal prosecution of whites and blacks, as well as other legal reform initiatives. Martial law was announced a legitimate, though regrettable, feature of an imperial state, but its constitutional status remained vague. The third chapter examines the revitalization of the Jamaica affair by a group of English ideologues and intellectuals and its transformation into an English affair concerned with English law and politics. The legitimate violence that the English political class came to debate was what they articulated as the violence against English law, not against the colonized. Chapter 4 delves into the legal literature about martial law, which was generated following the Jamaica affair. The chapter traces the incoherent body of principles that this literature produced and argues that it was a product of the political positions of the writers. Chapter 5 picks up from where chapter 3 left off and examines the first legal attempts to bring the controversy over the Jamaica affair to a decisive conclusion in the English criminal courts. Chapters 6 and 7 cover the public interventions of two eminent justices, the charges they made, and the different positions they held about the Jamaica affair. In these last three chapters, Kostal recovers the different understandings of law, empire, and martial law that were expressed. The result was no theory of martial law, but radically differing positions. In the concluding essay, Kostal observes that the Jamaica affair concerned the sensibilities of Englishmen, not black men and women. It revealed the obsession with the self, even as when the oppression of the other was a stake. Furthermore, the grounds of morality were legality. The more judges and lawyers disagreed over the law of martial law, the more they indirectly strengthened the secular sensibility that derived morality from the law.

In addition to the main chapters, the book includes an epilogue and an appendix. The appendix is a bibliographical essay that identifies historical questions, methods, and interpretations that shaped the scholarship about this affair. It argues that most scholarship neglected, or failed to thoroughly interrogate, the significance of the law for the Jamaica affair and, more broadly, for understanding domestic and imperial politics in mid-Victorian England. Somewhat unconvincing is Kostal's discussion of historians examining the Jamaica affair through the lens of race. He argues that “race” is “too narrow an aperture for seeing something as unruly and complex as the Jamaica affair” (498). But “race” is as complex as “law” is, and to label law as a broader historical force is to ignore, as critical theorists of law and race have taught us, how law, as a culture- and meaning-creating force, constitutes race and is constituted by it. Indeed, there are many instances in the book that speak to this intersection, and they shape its contribution to studies of the British Empire.

Arguably, the main shortcoming of the book is its length (more than five hundred pages). But this length is also to be appreciated, as it is informed by a method of historical research that insists on studying the details of historical episodes from within. A similar method, or theory, informs the book's treatment of law, whereby it is understood as a site of contestation where multiple arguments, meanings, actors are staged. This approach to the law departs from positivist definitions that view it as a body of abstract and coherent principles. What the book does not do, however, is to examine the workings of this multiplicity (legal and historical). Can we assess the meanings of this richness, not only recover its past existence? And, if so, what were its power operations? Kostal suggests toward the end of the book that the English elite was willing to openly confront the contradictions generated by their political choices in the world and to reassess their jurisprudence of power. But might it be that these never-resolved reassessments, the tensions and differences, contributed to the expansion of the empire and to its moral grounds?