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 Gallows demonstrates 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.

Imperial Justice explores the imperial control of judicial governance and the adjudication of colonial difference in British Africa. Focusing on the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council and the colonial regional Appeal Courts for West Africa and East Africa, it examines how judicial discourses of native difference and imperial universalism in local disputes influenced practices of power in colonial settings and shaped an evolving jurisprudence of Empire. Arguing that the Imperial Appeal Courts were key sites where colonial legal modernity was fashioned, the book examines the tensions that permeated the colonial legal system such as the difficulty of upholding basic standards of British justice while at the same time allowing for local customary divergence which was thought essential to achieving that justice. The modernizing mission of British justice could only truly be achieved through recognition of local exceptionality and difference. Natives who appealed to the Courts of Empire were entitled to the same standards of justice as their 'civilized' colonists, yet the boundaries of racial, ethnic, and cultural difference somehow had to be recognized and maintained in the adjudicatory process. Meeting these divergent goals required flexibility in colonial law-making as well as in the administration of justice. In the paradox of integration and differentiation, imperial power and local cultures were not always in conflict but were sometimes complementary and mutually reinforcing. The book draws attention not only to the role of Imperial Appeal Courts in the colonies but also to the reciprocal place of colonized peoples in shaping the processes and outcomes of imperial justice. A valuable addition to British colonial literature, this book places Africa in a central role, and examines the role of the African colonies in the shaping of British Imperial jurisprudence.

Number of Exhibits: 2