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Imperial Gallows

By Stacey Hynd

Product Image: Imperial Gallows

Imperial Gallows

By Stacey Hynd

0 - Default Title
Description
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 Gallowsdemonstrates 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.
Product details
Binding:
Paperback
Edition:
1
Number of Pages:
272
Release Date:
2025-05-29
Publication Date:
2025-05-29
Publisher:
Bloomsbury Academic
Languages:
Original: English
ISBN10:
1350302678
ISBN13:
9781350302679
GPSR Manufacturer Reference:
[email protected]
Weight:
418 g
Height:
156 cm
Width:
234 cm
Thickness:
15 cm
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