This dissertation examines the relationship between metropolitan fiction and colonial law during the second half of the nineteenth-century. Building on contemporary scholarship in postcolonial studies of Victorian literature, along with recent calls to rethink how we study racism, whiteness, and empire in Victorian Studies, I show how the metropolitan novel collaborated with colonial laws that reshaped British rule abroad from the 1860s onward. After a series of colonial uprisings that dramatically challenged the posterity of the British Empire, this period saw the turning away from liberal justifications of imperialism to a “culturalist” model of colonial governance that placed new emphasis on the cultural specificity of native society, as political theorist Karuna Mantena has argued. In “Colonized Futures: Law, Inheritance, and Empire in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel,” I reveal the novel’s investments in the future of empire by showing how the inheritance plot furthers some of the most pressing legal reforms of this period, from the political conflict over the expansion of citizenship rights in Jamaica, to the codification movement in India, to the emergence of the comparative method foundational to Britain’s indirect rule. I show how realist writers such as George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, and Thomas Hardy transcode into the inheritance plot the efforts of colonial lawmakers to reestablish imperial authority abroad. Alongside their novels, this dissertation draws on the legalistic work of some of the most influential jurists and colonial administrators of the time—Frederic Harrison, James Fitzjames Stephens, and Henry Maine—to demonstrate how the novel dramatizes, endorses, and resists the legal order they envisioned for the future of empire.