TY - JOUR
T1 - Dissecting Sites of Punishment
T2 - Penal Colonies and Their Borders
AU - Popova, Zhanna
AU - Di Pasquale, Francesca
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
Copyright © 2019 Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis.
PY - 2019/12/1
Y1 - 2019/12/1
N2 - Although a crucial element of imperial architecture, non-metropolitan penal colonies remain relatively understudied, compared with the richness of historical scholarship on modern prison systems in Western Europe and its offshoots. Complementing the perspective chosen in the recent International Review of Social History Special Issue 26, Transportation, Deportation and Exile: Perspectives from the Colonies in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, the four articles in this Special Theme propose an additional angle of investigation of the role of convicts in the incorporation of new territories into colonial empires. The authors place sites of punishment, rather than flows of convicts, at the core of their reflection, and provide a close-up analysis of circulations of information and people across the borders of penal sites on various scales: local, trans-regional, and international. They problematize the notion of border, and consider it as a vantage point that leads to a new conceptualization of the penal colony as a system that expands in its surroundings and, in turn, assimilates external political, social, and economic stimuli. Relying on several distinct methodological approaches, the authors foreground the specificities of colonial punishment and demonstrate how punishment became part of the creation and maintenance of power inequalities between the colonies and the metropoles.
AB - Although a crucial element of imperial architecture, non-metropolitan penal colonies remain relatively understudied, compared with the richness of historical scholarship on modern prison systems in Western Europe and its offshoots. Complementing the perspective chosen in the recent International Review of Social History Special Issue 26, Transportation, Deportation and Exile: Perspectives from the Colonies in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, the four articles in this Special Theme propose an additional angle of investigation of the role of convicts in the incorporation of new territories into colonial empires. The authors place sites of punishment, rather than flows of convicts, at the core of their reflection, and provide a close-up analysis of circulations of information and people across the borders of penal sites on various scales: local, trans-regional, and international. They problematize the notion of border, and consider it as a vantage point that leads to a new conceptualization of the penal colony as a system that expands in its surroundings and, in turn, assimilates external political, social, and economic stimuli. Relying on several distinct methodological approaches, the authors foreground the specificities of colonial punishment and demonstrate how punishment became part of the creation and maintenance of power inequalities between the colonies and the metropoles.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85070672252&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1017/S002085901900049X
DO - 10.1017/S002085901900049X
M3 - Review Article
AN - SCOPUS:85070672252
SN - 0020-8590
VL - 64
SP - 415
EP - 425
JO - International Review of Social History
JF - International Review of Social History
IS - 3
ER -