Imperial Gallows : Murder, Violence and the Death Penalty in British Colonial Africa, c.1915-60

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 m