Execution And Its Aftermath In the Nineteenth-Century British Empire

[From introduction] This chapter will explore the history of execution and its aftermath across the nineteenth-century British Empire. It will bring together in a single frame of analysis a diversity of ideas about and different practices of capital punishment, in order to reflect upon the relationship between metropolitan and imperial understandings of the meaning and value of execution as a deterrent punishment; the various modes of effecting judicial sentences of death, on the scaffold, guillotine and cannon; and variegations in post-execution practices, including the display of severed heads, hanging in chains, anatomisation, dissection, and the burial or burning of bodies. In elaborating and analysing for the first time a panimperial history of judicial killing, the chapter centres on the relationship between capital punishment and broader cultures of Empire, in particular ideas of colonial difference and distinction; and between capital punishment and enslavement, and the governance of Indigenous and migrant peoples. In so doing, it ranges across contexts, including Britain’s Indian Empire and Britain’s colonies in the Caribbean, Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and Australia, and raises further issues around the British inheritance of Dutch, Spanish and French legal practice in some places. In its theoretical scope, geographical scale and imperial reach, the chapter offers an original interpretation that places and gives fresh meaning to regional specificities, metropolitan and colonial, by situating each in relation to each other and within the context of a much larger imperial world.