Imperial Crime and Punishment

This fascinating collection directly addresses the urgent need to understand crime and its control within historical and global contexts. Engaging with migration, settlement, race, policy transfer and more, its chapters reveal how the patterns and practices of crime, policing and punishment were – and are -frequently interwoven with the wider historical forces of imperialism and colonialism. This book resonates with many profound contemporary issues and deserves a wide audience amongst all who care about the future of criminal justice and social justice, as well as their pasts.

Contextualise, contextualise, contextualise! The editors and authors of Imperial Crime and Punishment: Approaches from Historical Criminology remind us why history matters. This collection, in recovering and foregrounding these imperial histories of crime and punishment, adds crucial, critical historical dimension to calls for greater epistemic expansions in criminology—calls aimed at democratising both what we know and how we know. That this necessarily begins with situating our understanding of punishment’s centrality in a longer history of our contemporary arrangement becomes clear with each chapter, in this impressive collection. Contributions broaden knowledge regarding the entrenched role of punishment to our perspectives on peoples and places and our relationship with justice. In that regard, contributors help dispell deeply held illusions of punishment as an uncanny, discrete, and peripheral set of logics and practices safeguarding good people from bad people, and safeguarding social stability from the impositions of those labelled and feared as keen to destabilise it. Indeed, contributors reinforce the understanding that the centrality of punishment (including the synonymity with marginality) is neither an uncanny, nor discrete, nor peripheral, but is instead part of a historically embedded reproduction of logics fundamental to both organising and differentiating access to justice and positive recognition. Contributors explore a cross section of themes in this regard, including the significant role of prisons in community and social construction; the relationship between crime, poverty and welfare; the relationship between surveillance and marginality; and the relationship between relocation and disenfranchisment. As editors Watkins and Bland note, one key objective of the collection is to enable the recovery of lived histories so that scholars and other interested parties can add a critical historical dimension to contemporary (criminological) concerns.

A compelling sense of what historical criminology can add to debates on empire, colonialism and criminal justice [...] Imperial Crime and Punishment makes a timely and methodologically self-conscious contribution to the development of historical criminology as a field [...] a toolbox for widening the theoretical imagination of historical criminology across colonial geographies.