It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a British imperial agent with ambitions of conquest, must be in need of a law. Jane Austen’s version has potential wives calculating their attachments with remarkable ingenuity, but they have nothing over the legal acrobatics conducted in the colonies. Lobban’s Imperial Incarceration provides an exhaustive account of the different methods of sanitizing the detainment and deportation of African leaders who threatened British conquest during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Court records overflow with public statements regarding the clear inferiority of the subjects to be pacified, so it is difficult to comprehend why there was such a strong impulse to shine up imperial conquest in the armor of legality. Freudian analysis would suggest a need for collective delusion and/or denial about the sheer amount of suffering and violence involved in spreading British dominion around the world. Or it could be understood as a...