An Empire on Trial is the first book to explore the issue of interracial homicide in the British Empire during its height – examining these incidents and the prosecution of such cases in each of seven colonies scattered throughout the world. It uncovers and analyzes the tensions of empire that underlay British rule and delves into how the problem of maintaining a liberal empire manifested itself in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The work demonstrates the importance of the processes of criminal justice to the history of the empire and the advantage of a trans-territorial approach to understanding the complexities and nuances of its workings. An Empire on Trial is of interest to those concerned with race, empire, or criminal justice, and to historians of modern Britain or of colonial Australia, India, Kenya, or the Caribbean. Political and post-colonial theorists writing on liberalism and empire, or race and empire, will also find this book invaluable.

An Empire on Trial is the first book to explore the issue of interracial homicide in the British Empire during its height - examining these incidents and the prosecution of such cases in each of seven colonies scattered throughout the world. It uncovers and analyzes the tensions of empire that underlay British rule and delves into how the problem of maintaining a liberal empire manifested itself in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The work demonstrates the importance of the processes of criminal justice to the history of the empire and the advantage of a trans-territorial approach to understanding the complexities and nuances of its workings. An Empire on Trial is of interest to those concerned with race, empire, or criminal justice, and to historians of modern Britain or of colonial Australia, India, Kenya, or the Caribbean. Political and postcolonial theorists writing on liberalism and empire, or race and empire, will also find this book invaluable.

Many have told of the East India Company’s extraordinary excesses in eighteenth-century India, of the plunder that made its directors fabulously wealthy and able to buy British land and titles, but this is only a fraction of the story. When one of these men—Warren Hastings—was put on trial by Edmund Burke, it brought the Company’s exploits to the attention of the public. Through the trial and after, the British government transformed public understanding of the Company’s corrupt actions by creating an image of a vulnerable India that needed British assistance. Intrusive behavior was recast as a civilizing mission. In this fascinating, and devastating, account of the scandal that laid the foundation of the British Empire, Nicholas Dirks explains how this substitution of imperial authority for Company rule helped erase the dirty origins of empire and justify the British presence in India. The Scandal of Empire reveals that the conquests and exploitations of the East India Company were critical to England’s development in the eighteenth century and beyond. We see how mercantile trade was inextricably linked with imperial venture and scandalous excess and how these three things provided the ideological basis for far-flung British expansion. In this powerfully written and trenchant critique, Dirks shows how the empire projected its own scandalous behavior onto India itself. By returning to the moment when the scandal of empire became acceptable we gain a new understanding of the modern culture of the colonizer and the colonized and the manifold implications for Britain, India, and the world.

The principal protagonists of this history of the Enlightenment are non-literate, poor, and enslaved colonial litigants who began to sue their superiors in the royal courts of the Spanish empire. With comparative data on civil litigation and close readings of the lawsuits, The Enlightenment on Trial explores how ordinary Spanish Americans actively produced modern concepts of law.

A study of the internal tensions of British imperial rule told through murder and insanity trials Unsound Empire is a history of criminal responsibility in the nineteenth‑century British Empire told through detailed accounts of homicide cases across three continents. If a defendant in a murder trial was going to hang, he or she had to deserve it. Establishing the mental element of guilt--criminal responsibility--transformed state violence into law. And yet, to the consternation of officials in Britain and beyond, experts in new scientific fields posited that insanity was widespread and growing, and evolutionary theories suggested that wide swaths of humanity lacked the self‑control and understanding that common law demanded. Could it be fair to punish mentally ill or allegedly "uncivilized" people? Could British civilization survive if killers avoided the noose?

Empire On Trial is the first installment of a two-part series documenting the spread of empire from the birth of civilization and writing in Mesopotamia to the American empire of the present day. Groundbreaking new research uncovered by authors Paul Marlais and David Byrne traces the common links and trends over 5,000 years of history by following the money, tracking the movement of merchant activities, and studying the trail of written records of these eras, using mainstream scholarship from the fields of archaeology and linguistics, among others, to chronicle and shed light on what were once mysteries of the past. Many such mysteries have been resolved in recent years due to the mass availability of information on the internet, but Empire On Trial presents novel and stunning conclusions the reader will only find in this remarkable series.Accompanying the masterfully written text and the historical breakthroughs contained within it are close to a thousand academic references and over 200 images that include maps, architectural reconstructions, artifacts of every sort, in-depth information about written the archives uncovered in Ebla, Mari, Kanesh, and Amarna, and much more.This vast undertaking by Marlais and Byrne opens up a new world of knowledge into ancient empires that will be expanded upon in Book II, and is certain to make Empire On Trial one of the most important scholarly works of the twenty first century.

An examination of world's fairs in Britain and its two most important 19th-century colonies, Australia and India; arguing that the fairs provided a forum for shaping both national and imperial identities.