Abuse of Power

<p>Throughout the British Empire in the first half of the nineteenth century, argue legal historians Lauren Benton and Lisa Ford, there was a 'rage for order' as the metropolitan government sought, through legal reforms of different kinds, to neutralise despotic acts, 'arbitrary justice', corruption and abuses of power in various colonies.¹ The aim was not so much to protect the rights of convicts and slaves as to exert Crown control over colonial populations, including masters and elites, in the quest for higher standards of governance and to reassert British hegemony in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars. Reform was driven by a 'middle power' of officials ('agents of imperial power'), which included judges, law officers and commissioners of inquiry, committed to expanding the reach of imperial law and criminal procedure and limiting colonial autonomy.²</p>