Imperial Crime and Punishment - (Emerald Advances in Historical Criminology) by Emma D Watkins & Eleanor Bland (Hardcover)

About the Book

Seeking to redress the traditional focus of historical criminology on the West and Global North, Imperial Crime and Punishment brings a fresh perspective to this burgeoning field by drawing instead on imperial contexts.

Book Synopsis

Seeking to redress the traditional focus of historical criminology on the West and Global North, Imperial Crime and Punishment brings a fresh perspective to this burgeoning field by drawing instead on imperial contexts.

Chapters focus on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which witnessed the development of the recognisably 'modern' institutions of the criminal justice system, including policing and institutions of punishment and care. The collection broadly covers punishment and its institutions, enforcement, a reflection on methodological considerations for digital crime history, and more. Examining imperial contexts such as India and Australia beyond their immediate geographical context, authors highlight the global and imperial context including the movement of ideas between the British state and colonies, the international dimension of global punishments, and movement of labour in this period.

Offering empirically-based studies from the archives in order to understand and question beliefs about crime and social harm today, as well as ongoing practices both in, and outside of, the criminal justice system, Imperial Crime and Punishment provides a broad temporal and spatial scope to build the historical criminology literature and better understand and critique the world as it currently is.

Review Quotes

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.

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.

About the Author

Emma D. Watkins is Associate Professor in Criminology at the University of Birmingham, UK.

Eleanor Bland is Associate Professor and Programme Lead for Criminology at Oxford Brookes University, UK.