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Penal Power and Colonial Rule

Penal Power and Colonial Rule

Author: Mark Brown
Publisher: Routledge-Cavendish
ISBN: 9781138944817

Published In: August 2015
Format: Paperback
Jurisdiction: U.K. ? Disclaimer:
Countri(es) stated herein are used as reference only
Hardback Edition ISBN: 9780415452137

HKD 688.87

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Penal Power and Colonial Rule provides an account of the distinctive way in which criminology developed outside the metropolitan centre. Proposing a radical revision of the Foucauldian thesis that criminological knowledge emerged in the service of a new form of power - discipline - that had inserted itself into the very centre of punishment, it argues that Foucault's alignment of sovereign, disciplinary and governmental power will, necessarily, need to be re-read and re-balanced to account for its operation in the colonial sphere. For, although the emergence of disciplinary power and its attendant forms of knowledge provided for key social transformations in the modernising metropolitan state, in colonial states power was almost exclusively sovereign and governmental (bio-political), with disciplinary strategies given only limited and equivocal attention.

In order to develop this argument, and give an account of the emergence of colonial criminology as a form of knowledge distinct from its metropolitan counterpart, this book provides an analysis of the key British colonial experience in India from the 1820s to the early 1920s. This analysis documents a colonial criminology, that was tied in crucial ways to the demands of colonial governance, whose birth can be placed fifty years or more before Lombroso or Ferri stepped upon the European stage: a criminology that developed its own unique modes of analysis, representation and measurement independent of metropolitan theory and practice. Drawing on postcolonial theory to ask whether we can speak of 'colonial modernity' or 'the colonial state' in the singular, it is, moreover, through the critical engagement of this analysis with Foucault's theoretical and historical account of the development of criminology that Penal Power and Colonial Rule opens up a new, and unduly negleted area of research.

1. Introduction

Part 1: Framework

2. Power, Knowledge, Reason

3. Colonialism and Postcolonialism

Part 2: Colonial Criminology

4. Out of History: Ethnologies of Deviance

5. Locating in Space: Cartographies of Disorder

6. Perceiving the Other: Representations of Limit

7. Rational Management: Architectures of Control

Part 3: Power and Order

8. Colonial Power, Colonial Criminology

9. Postcolonial Futures