Louis Riel, Métis leader of the North-West Rebellion of 1885, was sentenced to death for treason in 1885. Jimmy Governor, an aboriginal laborer, was executed in 1901 for a series of brutal murders and robberies. The men seemingly shared nothing in common apart from death on the gallows under the British Empire. And yet, as Catherine Evans aptly demonstrates in Unsound Empire: Civilization and Madness in Late-Victorian Law, both men's stories provide insight into not only imperial systems of law, but some of the fundamental questions of empire. Through a series of case histories of homicide trials in Australia, Canada, England, and India, Evans traces the “history of imperial law in sedimentary layers” (19). In bringing together imperial stories from subfields that are not always in conversation with each other, Evans brings a detailed specificity to each of her case studies. It is not only useful but essential that Evans demonstrates the complexities and questions raised in cases that occurred in the metropole, settler, and colonial spaces. British law was theoretically universal, and yet each context tested the applicability of that theory in the real world.
Unsound Empire is about concepts of civilization and insanity, as the title suggests, and yet more importantly, Evans interrogates the concept of criminal responsibility. She highlights the slippery overlap between irresponsibility and insanity as concepts in British law. Evans highlights how late-Victorian British jurists struggled with the question of whether non-white imperial subjects could and should be held to the same standards as white Europeans. If British justice was to be fair and universal, should it treat all subjects equally, or should it take different racial, gender, and religious identities into account? In outlining the contested nature of imperial justice, Evans demonstrates how judges, lawyers, and juries went beyond the letter of the law in defining justice
The introduction provides a useful description of the spatial and international nature of records and archives in the study. Evans's historiographical breadth is encompassing and offers a useful primer for those not familiar with legal or medical histories. The first chapter provides an overview of the M'Naghten rule, including the case itself and its deep intellectual and practical contexts. Evans uses a few high-profile English murder trials to demonstrate how judges, doctors, lawyers, juries, and patients defined the boundaries of madness.
In “A Criminal Lunatic in Search of a Trial,” Evans examines the case of Thomas Maltby, who murdered a local judge, seemingly without cause. The Madras government declared him a criminal lunatic and got him back to England as quickly as possible, in keeping with English desires to keep English lunatics out of colonial spaces. Yet Maltby believed that as an Englishman it was his right to have a trial. As Evans notes here and in several other cases, the nature of his motive defined his mental state. As a white Englishman, his conspiratorial delusions were considered proof of his insanity. One question that runs throughout the book is about who would and would not be granted the label insane, a question that was interlinked with questions of race, civilization, and imperialism.
Evans develops ideas of civilization and moral insanity in the third and fourth chapters, the first of which digs into one of the thorny issues of evil. William Biggs's impulsive, cruel violence toward humans and animals from a young age in Canada seemed to be part of his inborn character. Evans weaves his tale through contemporary debates about biological theories of criminality and analogous British cases that questioned how justice might square the circle of moral insanity and civilization. In the next chapter, she looks at moral insanity through the legal career of Marshall Lyle in Australia, who campaigned against the limits of the M'Naghten rule. Using a close focus on key trials that tried to move the needle on criminal responsibility demonstrates that the final judgment in landmark cases is not the whole story of medico-legal thinking.
The fifth and sixth chapters explore connections in thinking between colonial subjects and women in terms of responsibility. Evans adds colonial nuance to the well-traveled terrain of infanticide and child-killing, detailing how the specific sympathies of English courtrooms were transformed in colonial spaces. In India, in particular, infanticide trials were heavily influenced by the politics of the British civilizing mission that focused on female child killing. It is useful that Evans interrogates the key texts of Indian medical jurisprudence to see how they overlap and differ from their English counterparts.
In “The Savage Heart of Empire,” Evans uses the Jimmy Governor case to examine how beliefs in the inherent otherness of colonized people could cast doubt on the underpinnings of colonial government and law. Evans argues that in the case of aboriginal Australians in particular, racialized ideas tested British faith in the universal applicability of justice and British law. While no one claimed that Governor was insane, there was significant doubt if he was truly responsible for his actions. The racism that seemed to fuel his rage was equally evident in his trial. In the final chapter Evans looks at the complexity of context, focusing on Western Canadian cases in which the different faith systems of Cree, English, French, and Métis were central to understandings of criminal responsibility. Often the deciding factor in sentencing was less the facts of the case than the greater context of colonial uprisings and governance.
Unsound Empire is a useful addition to questions posed by Martin Wiener in his work on imperial law, though one might have hoped for more engagement with his recent work. And while this reader was pleased to see gender addressed as a key theme when relevant, Evans might have found more recent work than Elaine Showalter's discredited statistics. These are small quibbles about a work that speaks both to metropolitan and colonial ideas of law and justice, and is a welcome addition to imperial intellectual and legal history.
