Execution and Empire: A History of Judicial Killing Under British Colonial Rule 1815-1980

This project is a comparative study of judicial execution across the British Empire, from the end of the Napoleonic Wars to the late twentieth century. Despite the enormous interest in punishment amongst historians, no inventory of British colonial punishment has yet been compiled, and nor has there been any analysis of the range and scope of judicial execution across space and over time.

The overall goal of the project is to assess the degree to which law, practices and perceptions of capital punishment in British colonies developed independently of metropolitan direction, and what this tells us about the transplantation and reception of British law in different parts of the world.

This project sets out to answer: How do we explain differences in the law, practice and perception of judicial execution in British colonies between 1815 and 1980? In order to answer this question, the project focuses on the colonies of Natal, Fiji, and the Straits Settlements. These case studies are also set within a broad global context. The principal methodology of the project is archival research. This archival research will take place in both Britain and each of the territories under investigation. This approach not only provides access to a range of material including statistical data and qualitative material, it also ensures that the arguments of the project are grounded in the experiences in the colonies, rather than the often remote understandings of colonial capital punishment that were held by those in the metropole.

The strength of this project is its timeliness and relevance. The retention of capital punishment in many nations of the British Commonwealth is rooted in their colonial histories, which are key to an understanding of the variance in the legislation and practice of capital punishment, and debates about abolition, today.