A study of the first three decades of British rule in Hong Kong, focusing on the troubled and controversial process of establishing a British colony at Hong Kong and on the reception of British rule by people in the region.

The first comprehensive legal appraisal of tribunals convened across Asia to try war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.

Standing close together in a compound overlooking Victoria Harbor, the Central Police Station, Central Magistracy, and Victoria Jail were a bastion of British colonial power and a symbol of security, law, and punishment. The magistracy administered a form of cheap summary justice heavily adapted to the needs of colonial Hong Kong, which led to well over a million predominantly Chinese people being sentenced between 1841 and 1941. In the overcrowded and unsanitary Victoria Jail, the regime vacillated uneasily between a belief in harsh deterrent punishment and an optimistic faith in reform and rehabilitation. Today, those monumental buildings still stand, forming Hong Kong's "Tai Kwun" complex, an international arts and entertainment hub. Richly illustrated and informed by a wealth of sources, Crime, Justice, and Punishment in Colonial Hong Kong revisits the Tai Kwun complex's past by offering a vivid account of those three institutions from 1841 to the late twentieth century and telling the stories of people whose lives intersected with them, including captains, superintendents, and magistrates, jailers and constables, thieves and ruffians, hawkers and street boys, down-and-outs, and prostitutes, gamblers, debtors, and beggars--the guilty as well as the innocent.

Today, questions about how and why societies punish are deeply emotive and hotly contested. In Crime and Punishment in Contemporary Culture, Claire Valier argues that criminal justice is a key site for the negotiation of new collective identities and modes of belonging. Exploring both popular cultural forms and changes in crime policies and criminal law, Valier elaborates new forms of critical engagement with the politics of crime and punishment. In doing so, the book discusses: · Teletechnologies, punishment and new collectivities · The cultural politics of victims rights · Discourses on foreigners, crime and diaspora · Terror, the death penalty and the spectacle of violence. Crime and Punishment in Contemporary Culture makes a timely and important contribution to debate on the possibilities of justice in the media age.