As the empire began to expand, law was being developed beyond England. The “law of sea” was a term coined to represent the fact that the law in England was meant to be different from the law when at sea. This was evident in the case where a captain by the name of Francis Temple ordered his crew to flog a sick seaman until he died from the wounds and was charged with murder by a corner’s inquest in 1805, but the grand jury threw out all charges. The captains of ships were given power by Judges that was seen as the law and thus could get away with most charges. The emergence of trade unions and a rising of intolerance of violence in the workplace helped minorities who worked in ships since their interests were being acknowledged. The maltreatment of workers by Captains not only was not tolerated but would also be denounced by the press describing those captains as monsters. Acts for the welfare of seamen increased like the Admiralty Offenses Colonial Act 1849 which provided that crimes within jurisdiction of admiralty could be tried in any colony as long as the crime had been committed within the waters of the colony. This newfound interest for the well-being of shipmates was beneficial towards the minorities that were onboard of these ships. In 1887 when Justice Stephen presided over a murder trial of a ship’s captain, James Cocks of the Lady Douglas and three of his crew were charged with the murder of a Malay prisoner who had escaped and retreated in the back of the ship with a knife where the Malay was shot, and the captain finished him off. Even though Malaysians were seen as savages and weren’t in good relations with the English, the Captain was given five years penal servitude and the crew were given eighteen months of hard labor, although this was less punishment than the usual murder convict got, this trial was to serve as a lesson for how captains and crews should behave in the future.
Queensland Australia was a smaller colony right off New South Wales in 1859 and was a self-governing colony. The colony was best suited for agriculture and plantations needed labor. Since Aborigines could not be trained and would run away, Governor Bowen told the Colonial Office that recruitment from the nearby Pacific Islands was legally recognized in 1868. As missionaries tried to convert Aborigines, they began to sympathize them and officials at the Colonial office began to do the same. Unlike what had occurred on British vessels coming to and from England, what took place in Queensland was outside of the authority of such courts. However, an 1872 act was amended by Parliament in 1875 to create an Order in Council of a High Commissioner having jurisdiction over all British subjects throughout the western pacific. On October 19, 1887, William Nichols, a coal miner, was seen beating a fourteen-year-old Aborigine girl and was charged for murder and a sentence of seven years imprisonment. By 1888, northern Queensland had found its settlers’ economic and political power secure and were beginning to no longer fear Aborigines. The reliance of Chinese labor also shifted the prejudice over from the aborigines to the Chinese. Thus, many cases were reported of the crimes against the aboriginals.
The British had avoided Fiji due to the fear of the unknown but began settling in the 1830s when many traders and missionaries came. Chief Cakobau of the Fijian natives converted to Christianity and gave Europeans the idea that Fijians could be civilized. Fijian settlers began identifying less with Britain and was annexed in 1874. Arthur Gordon was sent to govern Fiji in 1875. He did not want to repeat the same mistake he did in Australia and New Zealand where settlers came in rapidly and overwhelmed government efforts to restrain their rapturous desire for land and their bad treatment of original inhabitants. The colonial office let Gordon experiment with Fiji to see if his idea of treating natives well would work. Since Fiji was new and small, officials had greater control over it and some parts of native society functioned too. Fiji was to provide a model of how imperial government was to exert real control over interracial relations in a new British possession. Governor Gordon did not want to interfere with natives, so he brought Indians to work as indentured laborers. When Patrick Scanlon was charged with the murder of a South Seas Islander worker in 1877, it was doubtful whether he was entitled by the ordinances of annexation to a jury trial. Chief Justice Gorrie said that because this was a capital offense that he was entitled to a jury. The Jury acquitted Scanlon of any offense and Gorrie publicly disagreed with the verdict. Gordon was upset since he knew that any white man who kills a native would be seen as not guilty and did not think that Scanlon deserved a jury. In Fiji, the indenture system was at its worst. Although Gordon’s experiment helped the natives receive better treatment, it came at the cost of the Indians, whose labor enabled Fiji to succeed economically while allowing Fijians to keep their land and culture. Within this experiment, the protection of the law could be called upon the Fijians, against Europeans, but far less effective by imported Indians. It was a triumph of racial justice over Queensland but was a very partial and tainted one.
Trinidad was similar to Fiji in the sense that it was small, but the main difference was that it had been under British rule for a very long time. Trinidad had developed a white elite group that had come from rich white slave owners who had a habit for command. Despite emancipation, they ran their businesses as they saw fit and did not listen to imperial officials. The planters had grown powerful and were in government positions. This stopped in 1866 when Arthur Gordon was governor when he heard about the Jamaican rebellion. Gordon put in many reforms that helped the lower class buy land, set up primary schools, and looked more closely at the treatment of laborers. Gordon was promoted to the colony of Mauritius and was replaced by J.R. Longden. The planters got their power back since Longden wasn’t as strong of an official. Soon enough, Gordon’s policies were reverted. John Gorrie was appointed to be the new prime minister of Trinidad. Gorrie got along with both the black and white population when he was appointed in 1866. He didn’t not follow legal restraints when he helped the poor and wanted to make the legal system work faster and more available to the masses. Gorrie was not well perceived among the planters and got a third judge to counter Gorrie’s laws. The white elite was able to influence the Colonial office to replace Gorrie with a new judge. A similar event was to take place in the Bahamas. The colony was not a crown colony and had more of a self-government. The Bahamas had a ruling elite that was from a family of elites “Bay Street boys”. But in 1880, the imperial government sent Henry Austin to be Chief Justice. High property qualifications restricted jury service to the well-off along with the judge and police positions; qualified colored men only rarely received appointments. Two chief justices ended up losing their jobs as their ruling in various criminal cases against the Bay street boys had made the elite influence the colonial office to rid of the justices that did were refusing to be controlled by the elite. Both of these colonies were not able to exceed far in criminal justice as the white elite groups had gotten rid of judges that were in favor of equal treatment to British subjects in the court of law.
Many cases of violent death at the hands of Europeans never even reached the criminal courts. India was the heart of empire, with a population larger than all the rest put together. British India was neither a settlement colony nor a crown colony, it was in its own category. In late 19th century, it had a huge native population and was socially distinct from the rest of the empire. It also had a large military force and about 150,000 Europeans in the population with about an equal number of mixed race “Eurasians”. The nonofficial Englishmen felt superior to the Indians which was derived from a fear of vastly being outnumbered by natives, traumatized by mutiny of 1857, and would react to a hint of threat because of the vast land of India. This sense of insecurity was only enhanced by their self-segregation from Indians other than servants. Even at its height, the raj had rooted tensions. The hardening case of racial solidarity increased the willingness of Anglo-Indian jurors to ignore prosecution evidence and even judicial directions, making the treatment of European violence against non-Europeans more lenient. There was a rise among the elite minority of educated Indians, which began to produce its own assertiveness. Some Indians were discovering that as British subjects, they also had rights and learned from the Anglo-Indian community to publicize their grievances and demanding ratification. The raj found themselves between two conflicting communities, white and native, to satisfy one was to enrage another. British public awareness of Indian affairs grew slowly at first and then steadily in the years leading to first world war. If many British soldiers posed a political challenge to legitimacy of raj’s rule of law, so too did many non-military and non-official Europeans. These Anglo-Indians had interests of their own that didn’t coincide with the government and divided up whites and nonwhites. It looked as though things were changing for the better, and Indians began seeing the government in a better light. The postwar repression that culminated in the Amritsar massacre changed feelings, but one should resist looking back at the alienation and radicalism of the post-Amritsar into earlier times. The postwar crisis helped make further reform of the British government. From outside India, the government was increasingly constrained by a more liberal British public opinion and by international scrutiny, to carefully uphold its proclaimed principles of non-racism and equality under the law. Britain and India found it important to uphold their values of a fair legal system. The ideals of the rule of law and the rights of the subject could be found even by the most conservative groups.