Abstract
This chapter examines the origins and historical evolution of the Imperial Appeal Courts: the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council (JCPC), the West African Court of Appeal, and the East African Court of Appeal. It analyses their organizational structures and judicial procedures. The chapter offers an analysis of the imperial imperatives that drove their formation, and the conditions in the colonies that shaped their evolution. The chapter also broadly explores the ways in which African litigants engaged with these courts and, in the case of the JCPC, how official discourse regarding these imperial courts formed an integral part of the wider debate on imperial judicial governance. Understanding how and why the JCPC became so central to the administration of justice in the colonies and to the debates over identity politics requires an excursion into its origins in the early nineteenth century