In recent years many historians have become dissatisfied with the limitations of national history and have sought to move toward a broader perspective. Historians of the British Empire have been feeling a similar confinement. Consequently, interest has grown in studying the relationships between imperial “center” and “periphery” or, even better, between center and multiple locales, and between one locale and another, in the Empire. Such history, interactionist and comparative, might best be called “trans-territorial.” Important recent works following one particular theme through different parts of the Empire, like Douglas Hay and Paul Craven's Masters, Servants, and Magistrates in Britain and the Empire and Philippa Levine's Prostitution, Race and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire, have shown how much about the workings and meaning of Empire becomes clear only when a wider and interrelated view is taken.

This book similarly takes one issue – interpersonal interracial homicide – and seeks to follow, through a broad range of imperial contexts, how it was dealt with and what that “dealing with” reveals about the nature of the British Empire at the height of its power. At first glance this problem may appear to be a rather small and limited one, but it involved portentous questions of how nonwhite races were to be governed, particularly where they came into regular interaction with whites, and of how the liberalism so strong in modern Britain was to be reconciled with the imperial rule of non-Britons.