This ambitious monograph attempts to cover a great deal of material that is disparate not only in terms of space and time but also in terms of methodological approaches and disciplinary perspectives. As the subtitle suggests, this is a comparative legal history of the contact between Indigenous peoples and British settlers in Australia and Canada during the 19th century. The authors have adopted an expansive understanding of legal history that emphasizes the history of policing and criminal justice. Although this is a collective endeavor by four Canadian and Australian authors and not a collection of essays, chapters on missionary work and nationalist historiography appear to be ill-fitted to the work's general undertaking. Nevertheless, the authors do a fine job of examining and comparing state policy toward Aboriginal peoples to illustrate how state law never fully supplanted Aboriginal law and custom, the modes of settler domination, and the elements of Aboriginal resistance. In the end, however, readers may be left to wonder just what Aboriginal "customary law" entailed, how it differed between the two locations under study, and the extent to which it survived or was reconfigured by colonization. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.

--J. A. Jaffe, University of Wisconsin--Whitewater

James Alan Jaffe

University of Wisconsin--Whitewater