This book explores the history of Indigenous/settler relations through the lens of criminal law’s relationship with Indigenous people. Many socio-legal and historical studies have focused on inter-racial offences, from which are read the racialized character of legal regimes. By contrast, we argue that there has been too little attention in legal, socio-legal, criminological and historical work to the phenomena of inter se violence. This absence has limited the understanding of the law in modern states. In this text, we break from this approach and examine the foundations of criminal law’s response to the victimization of one Indigenous person by another (inter se crime). Our study asks how the criminal law deals with inter se violence. Bringing together our expertise and interest in law and history, we explore the policing, prosecution and punishment of Indigenous violence in Australia over the past 200 years. Through this study, we demonstrate how criminal law is consistently framed as the key test of sovereignty, whatever the challenges faced in effecting its jurisdiction. Indigenous Crime and Settler Law draws on a wealth of archival and legal case material to contribute to a better appreciation of the historical depth and legal complexity posed by the co-existence of multiple socio-cultural formations in one territorial space. Here, we use Australia as a case study to explore the way sovereignty and jurisdiction work in post-colonial states. Hence, this book is also about the legacy of empire and the impact of colonization on law in the modern state, themes which echo throughout contemporary socio-legal scholarship. Ultimately, we show that, against the changing background of settler encounters with Australian Indigenous peoples, the question of Indigenous amenability to imported British criminal law in Australia was not resolved in the nineteenth century and remains surprisingly open. We conclude that settlers and Indigenous peoples still live in the shadow of empire, struggling to reach an understanding of each other, a condition that resonates in post-colonial communities throughout the world.