Crime and empire, 1840-1940 : criminal justice in local and global context

268 Pages·2005·5.457 MB·English

by  Dunstall, Graeme, Godfrey, Barry S

Crim e and Empire 1840-1940

Crime and Empire
1840-1940
Criminal justice in local and global context
edited by
Barry S. Godfrey
Graeme Dunstall
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© Editors and contributors 2005
All rights reserved; no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
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First published 2005
ISBN 1-84392-108-1 (cased)
ISBN 1-84392-107-3 (paperback)
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Cover photograph © Mary Evans Picture Library, original photograph by Watts & Skeen,
reproduced in The Queen's Empire. The photograph shows inmates at Burma's Rangoon gaol
in 1900, forced to work the prison's giant treadmill.
Typeset by GCS, Leighton Buzzard, Beds
Project management by Deer Park Productions, Tavistock, Devon
Printed and bound by T.J. International Ltd, Trecerus Industrial Estate, Padstow, Cornwall
Contents
Foreword by Carolyn Strange vu
Notes on the editors and contributors IX
Acknowledgements xw
1 Crime and empire: introduction 1
Graeme Dunstall and Barry S. Godfrey
2 The changes in policing and penal policy in
nineteenth-century Europe 8
Clive Emsley
3 Explaining the history of punishment 25
John Pratt
4 Crimes of violence, crimes of empire? 43
Mark Finnane
5 Colonialism and the rule of law: the case of South Australia 57
Julie Evans
Crime and Empire 1840-1940
6 Colonial history and theories of the present: some reflections
upon penal history and theory 76
Mark Brown
7 Crime, the legal archive and postcolonial histories 92
Catharine Coleborne
8 Traces and transmissions: techno-scientific symbolism in
early twentieth-century policing 106
Dean Wilson
9 The English model? Policing in late nineteenth-century
Tasmania 121
Stefan Pet row
10 The growth of crime and crime control in developing towns:
Timaru and Crewe, 1850-1920 135
Barry S. Godfrey and Graeme Dunstall
11 (Re)presenting scandal: Charles Reade's advocacy of
professionalism within the English prison system 145
Sarah Anderson
12 'Saving our unfortunate sisters'? Establishing the first separate
prison for women in New Zealand 159
Anna McKenzie
13 Maori police personnel and the rangatiratanga discourse 174
Richard S. Hill
14 'To make the precedent fit the crime': British legal responses
to sati in early nineteenth-century north India 189
jane Buckingham
15 'Everyday life' in Boer women's testimonies of the
concentration camps of the South African War, 1899-1902 202
Helen Dampier
16 Codification of the criminal law: the Australasian
parliamentary experience 224
Jeremy Finn
Index 239
Foreword
Carolyn Strange
Who cares about criminal justice history? Ask this question half a century
ago, and only a few lawyer-historians, and even fewer scholars working in
other disciplines, would have raised their hands. Ask it at the end of the
twentieth century and a growing range of historians, along with
criminologists, sociologists and anthropologists, would have piped up.
This collection of essays shows that the response is quite different today;
not only is the range of scholars intrigued by the criminal justice past
growing but the general public is keenly interested in the history of the
courts, the police and criminal sanctions. So-called 'cold cases' involving
unsolved crimes have become prime-time fodder, while lavish historical
documentaries dwell on famous trials and grisly punishments. Suddenly,
it seems, everyone is interested in the history of crime and criminal justice.
This is particularly the case in countries where European empire
builders brought law, European-style, to territories previously governed
by traditional rulers and rules. The legacy of colonisation is disputed dryly
in civil and constitutional courts in land claims cases but it is also contested
passionately on talk-back radio shows and in the popular press. It is not
surprising that indigenous peoples have called upon present-day
governments to redress wrongs of the past; what would have surprised the
old imperial administrators of criminal law is that many of those wrongs
were committed by colonisers who considered that they were doing right
by the law.
Crime and Empire 1840-1940
'Just how unlawful was criminal law in the past?' is a question that has
invited spirited rebuttals from imperial apologists, who assert that the
introduction of European legal systems (and British law in particular) was
a gift of civilisation in colonial settings. Against them a much greater
group of scholars have rejected the question for different reasons, prefer­
ring to examine carefully the records of criminal justice administration
through official sources, such as trial transcripts and gaol registers, but
also to approach the past imaginatively, through diaries, photos,
architecture and uniforms. For the contributors to this volume, then, the
question is not whether criminal justice modelled on British customs and
policies was 'good' or 'bad'; instead, it is 'how were crime and justice
conceived of and managed in the heyday of British imperialism?'
The answers are rarely predictable. As always, history, even of the
recent past, is an object lesson in the strangeness and familiarity of earlier
times. Key institutions established in the period covered by this collection
- the penitentiary and the professional police - persist in modified modes
in our own time, while other practices, such as public executions and the
criminalisation of certain 'tribes', seem safely and squarely in the remote
past. Interpreting continuity and rupture invites reasoned speculation, an
intellectual practice that earlier criminal justice historians typically
rejected in favour of making definitive assessments of the past. Another
shift from earlier modes of historical inquiry is the express engagement
with queries about the present, whether it be current bids for indigenous
self-determination or inquiries into systemic abuses of police power. In a
period when memories of the troubled and troubling past threaten to
eclipse scholarly analyses of criminal justice history in public policy
debates, collections such as these are timely; in other words, they are as
important to the present as to the past.
Carolyn Strange
Centre for Cross-cultural Research
Australian National University
January 2005
Notes on the editors and contributors
Editors
Barry S. Godfrey is Senior Lecturer in Criminology at Keele University
He teaches and researches crime and policing in the later nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries. He has edited Comparative Histories of Crime
(2003) with Clive Emsley and Graeme Dunstall. A co-authored book (with
Paul Lawrence) will be published in 2005, and a monograph entitled The
Rough: Marginal Criminality 1880-1939 is currently being written.
Graeme Dunstall is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of
Canterbury, New Zealand. He researches and teaches New Zealand social
history and criminal justice history. His publications include A Policeman's
Paradise? Policing a Stable Society 1918-1945 (1999); jointly editing
Comparative Histories of Crime (2003) with Barry Godfrey and Clive Emsley;
jointly editing Southern Capital. Christchurch: Towards a City Biography,
1850-2000 (2000); and a contribution to the Oxford History of New Zealand.
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