state-directed violence unfolded across the second empire and in what ways its systems were conceived, enacted, experienced, understood, and exonerated both in the colonies and in Britain. Two trials bookend this story: the eighteenth-century impeachment trial of Warren Hastings that put corruption and accountability in India to the test in Britain’s Parliament, and the recent Mau Mau case in London’s Royal Courts of Justice. During the intervening two hundred years, recurring questions about imperial violence and accountability dogged successive British governments.
