Colonizing Crime Control

Abstract

l isa Ford. Settler Sovereignty: Jurisdiction and Indigenous People in America and Australia, 1788-1836. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010. viii + 313 pp. Maps, notes, and index. In my youth I went to courthouses in western Kentucky, looking for the oldest documents I could find. Years later, remembering the excitement I felt when finding those aging pages, I took my students to courthouses, assigning them to write papers about what they found. That was when I understood just how difficult it can be to connect the ordinary business of the courts to larger historical issues. In Kentucky, I found some cases involving Indians, but not very many, and they seemed peripheral to the main business of the courts. Reading Settler Sovereignty makes me realize I should have paid lot more at- tention to those cases. I had no idea I was seeing the spread of state authority over indigenous peoples through its criminal justice system. Settler Sovereignty is local history, rooted in detailed examinations of court records in Georgia and New South Wales, Australia. Lisa Ford skillfully uses these local accounts to tell global narrative, a peculiar chapter in Lauren Benton's story about the global drive of colonial states to control plural regimes of law (p. 4). Lauren Benton's Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400-1900 (2002) makes the connection between colonizing and law; colonizers tolerated indigenous systems of justice, passing through period of pluralism, before imposing their legal systems on conquered peoples. In Ford's telling of the story, settlers perfected their power over indigenous peoples by claiming the right to rule everyone within their jurisdictions. She recognizes Locke, Blackstone, and Vatel's influence, but argues that well-read and well- traveled bureaucrats did the real work of colonial conquest in courthouses scattered around the world. In Georgia and New South Wales, many small- scale interactions, prosecutions for ordinary crimes, exemplified global shift in British legal practices, change from pluralism in favor of territorialism. The first portion of Settler Sovereignty describes the pluralism that preceded territoriality. Ford writes precisely, taking unusual care in the words she chooses. Hers is limited lexicon; she knows the right words, and not many synonyms will do. The word lynching, for example, appears just one time,