How were British ideas of penal servitude and the criminal justice system enacted off-shore, throughout its empire? In this seminar we will take a comparative approach to prison systems in colonial India and the Caribbean.

Additional intro material:

TBC

Essential seminar reading:

Primary:

• Report of the Committee on Prison Discipline to the Government General of India,(1838) pp. 11-22.
• Histories of prisons in Guyana

Secondary:

• Mira Rai Waits, 'Imperial Vision, Colonial Prisons: British Jails in Bengal, 1823-73', Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (2018)
• Clare Anderson, Kellie Moss, and Shammane Joseph Jackson, 'Coloniality and the Criminal Justice System: Empire and its Legacies in Guyana', Slavery and Abolition (2022)

Further reading:

Primary:

• Mary Carpenter, 'Suggestions on Prison Discipline and Female Education in India' (1877)
• Mary Carpenter, 'Six Months in India' (1868)
• Report of the Indian Jail Conference in Calcutta (1877), esp. Chapter V
• 'Vital Statistics of the Presidency Jail, Calcutta, during the years 1871-1876', India Medical Gazette (1878)

Secondary:

• Clare Anderson, The Indian Uprising of 1857: Prisons, Prisoners, and Rebellion (2007)
• --------------------, 'The Power of Words in Nineteenth Century Prisons: British Colonial Mauritius, 1835-1887', Critical Perspectives on Colonialism ed. by Fiona Paisley and Kirsty Reid (2013)
• Estherine Adams, '"At Work, in Hospital, or in Gaol": Women in British Guiana's Jails, 1838-1917', Labour History (2023)
• David Arnold, 'Labouring for the Raj: Convict Work Regimes in Colonial India, 1836-1939', in Global Convict Labour, ed. by Christian Giuseppe De Vito and Alex Lichtenstein (Brill, 2015)
• Sarah Balakrishnan, 'Of Debt and Bondage: From Slavery to Prisons in the Gold Coast (Ghana), c. 1807-1957', Journal of African History (2020).
• Mark Brown, Penal Power and Colonial Rule (London: Routledge, 2014)
• Cecelia A. Green, '"The Abandoned Lower Class of Females"' Class, Gender, and Penal Discipline in Barbados, 1875-1929', Comparative Studies in Society and History (2011)
• Mushirul Hasan, Roads to Freedom: Prisoners in Colonial India (2016)
• Stacey Hynd, '"... a Weapon of Immense Value?" Convict Labour in British Colonial Africa, 1850-1950', in Global Convict Labour, ed. by Christian Giuseppe De Vito and Alex Lichtenstein (Brill, 2015)
• Diana Paton, No Bond but the Law: Punishment, Race, and Gender in Jamaican State Formation, 1780–1870 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).
• Sandra Scicluna and Paul Knepper, 'Prisoners of the Sun: The British Empire and Imprisonment in Malta in the Early Nineteenth Century', British Journal of Criminology (2008)
• Satadru Sen, 'The Female Jails of Colonial India', Indian Economic and Social History Review (2002)
• Shani Roper, 'Punishment, Discipline, and Agency in the Colonial Reformatory in Colonial Jamaica, 1869-1885', Journal of Caribbean History (2016)
• Anne Ulentin, '"The Scale of Punishment Has Been Framed Specially for the Black Man": Imprisonment, Race, and Punishment in the Colonial Bahamas, 1840–1973', Journal of Caribbean History (2021)
• Arand A. Yang, 'The Prison-Handicraft Complex: Convict Labour in Colonial India', Modern Asian Studies (2023)
• -------------------, 'Disciplining "natives": Prisons and Prisoners in Early Nineteenth Century India', South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies (1987)