Catherine L. Evans. Unsound Empire: Civilization and Madness in Late-Victorian Law.

Abstract

Catherine L. Evans’s exciting first book, Unsound Empire: Civilization and Madness in Late-Victorian Law, is about a collision between forms of knowledge as dueling epistemologies of law and science were thrust together by the sprawling reach of British imperialism in the late nineteenth century. The liberal ideal of British justice long rested on the assumption that individuals subject to criminal proceedings were autonomous, rational, and therefore responsible for their actions. The significance of mens rea, or the defendant’s state of mind, arose from these psychological underpinnings of the common law. But the emergent professions and disciplines of the human sciences—psychiatry and anthropology in particular—challenged this regime by opening up a murky new underworld of divided selves, unbalanced minds, and primitive passions. Because lack of emotional restraint was thought to be endemic among supposedly less advanced races, uncertainty about criminal responsibility posed an especially acute problem for the governance of empire. How could the agents of the civilizing mission reconcile their commitments to liberal universalism and evolutionary hierarchy? The dilemma, Evans observes, was that “British civilization seemed to require both fidelity to the common law and the bold embrace of modern scientific truths” (120–121).