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Imperial Gallows: Murder, Violence and the Death Penalty in British Colonial Africa, c.1915-60

Imperial Gallows: Murder, Violence and the Death Penalty in British Colonial Africa, c.1915-60

Author: Stacey Hynd
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
ISBN: 9781350302679
Published In: May 2025
Format: Paperback
Jurisdiction: U.K. ? Disclaimer:
Countri(es) stated herein are used as reference only

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Not just a method of crime control or individual punishment in Britain's African territories, the death penalty was an integral aspect of colonial networks of power and violence. Imperial Gallows analyses capital trials from Kenya, Nyasaland and the Gold Coast to explore the social tensions that fueled murder among colonised populations, and how colonial legal cultures and landscapes of political authority shaped sentencing and mercy. It demonstrates how ideas of race, ethnicity, gender and 'civilization' could both spare and condemn Africans convicted of murder in colonial courts, and also how Africans could either appropriate or resist such colonial legal discourses in their trials and petitions.

In this book, Stacey Hynd follows the whole process of capital punishment from the identification of a murder victim to trial and conviction, through the process of mercy and sentencing onto death row and execution. The scandals that erupted over the death penalty, from botched executions and moral panics over ritual murder, to the hanging of anti-colonial rebels for 'terrorist' and emergency offences, provide significant insights into the shifting moral and political economies of colonial violence. This monograph contextualises the death penalty within the wider penal systems and coercive networks of British colonial Africa to highlight the shifting targets of the imperial gallows against rebels, robbers or domestic murderers. Imperial Gallows demonstrates that while hangings were key elements of colonial iconography in British Africa, symbolically loaded events that demonstrated imperial power and authority, they also reveal the limits of that power.

Introduction - Capital Punishment and Colonial Rule: Race, Violence and 'Civilization' in British Africa

1. 'The Extreme Penalty of the Law': Law, Courts and Colonial Criminal Justice

2. The 'Ultimate Deterrent' in a Colonial Context? Contestations in Colonial Penal Regimes

3. To Hang or Not to Hang? Capital Sentencing, Constructions of Deviance, and the Prerogative of Mercy

4. Cultural Defence Narratives, African Agency and the Landscape of Mercy

5. Murder and the Maintenance of 'Law and Order': Colonial Violence and Capital Punishment

6. Shocking Crimes and Scandalous Punishments: Imperial Politics, Humanitarian Sentiment and the Death Penalty

7. 'In a Humane and Decorous Manner': Rituals of Execution from Public Executions to Death Row

Conclusion

Bibliography

Index

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