CfP: The World of Prisons. The History of Confinement in Global Perspective, Late Eighteenth to Early Twentieth Century

The prison has a global history. The emergence of the modern state and, at least in Europe and the United States, the expansion of political rights involved a transformation of penal systems. At the centre of this development was the prison which evolved from a means of detention into the principal instrument of sanction. Between the early nineteenth and early twentieth century, imprisonment became the dominant form of punishment on a worldwide scale. But what exactly did this mean? And how can we explain this farreaching transformation of penal systems? Beyond broader historiographical turns and more specific conjunctures within the field – as the one triggered in the 1970s by the socalled “revisionist” accounts of the “birth of the prison” – the interest of historical scholarship in penal systems was ultimately based on a stable sense that research into penal regimes promised substantial insights into the changing power relations within societies, transformations of the exercise of authority, the development of statehood and dominating concepts of the relationship between the individual and the community. Accordingly, a lot of research has been done on the modern prison in Europe and the United States and, at least since the 1990s, also increasingly on confinement in Latin America, Asia and Africa. This notwithstanding, very basic questions about the prison as a global phenomenon remain unanswered. How and why did the prison succeed as the prevalent form of punishment around the globe? What exactly did “global” mean, considering the often immense diversity of existing penal regimes not only between but also within empires, nation states and colonies? And what do we actually refer to when we are talking about the prison, given the wide variety of institutions of confinement and penal regimes all over the world? How was the development of the prison interwoven with and separated from other forms of punishment? To what extent and in which ways were the transformations of penal regimes throughout the world interconnected with each other? What was the actual significance of cross-border transfers of knowledge about criminality and punishment for these local processes? How multidirectional were the knowledge transfers within and between continents? And, finally, how do we have to think about decentring the history of the prison in a global context? Forty years after the publication of Michel Foucault’s seminal work Discipline and Punish, it can be argued that the integration of the history of the prison into the perspectives of global history remains the last discernible promise for a fundamental innovation in the field. The conference The World of Prisons. The History of Confinement in a Global Perspective, Late Eighteenth to Early Twentieth Century aims at discussing such questions and thereby making a first broadly based contribution to combining the research about prison history with the approaches of global history. The focus lies on the similarities and differences of transformations of penal regimes in different regions and continents as well as on the interconnectedness between them; on the mutually dependent processes of the universalisation and the particularisation of ideas and practices of imprisonment; on the production and circulation of knowledge about penal regimes on a global scale; and on the significance of far-reaching cross-border transfers for local developments. On an analytical level, the conference aims not only to transcend the established internalist modes of understanding and explaining the historical transformations of penal regimes. It also treats the centrality of Western European and US-American developments in the field as an object of research and not as its premise. The conference, therefore, generates a global perspective on the history of the modern prison not by accumulating and juxtaposing accounts of local or regional developments of penal systems from all over the world, but by discussing contributions that are based either on the reconstruction and analysis of long-distance transfers and interconnections across borders or on systematic comparison. The historical period under consideration spans from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century. “The world of prisons” to be studied comprises the whole range of possible analytical levels as well as their entanglements, from the intercontinental circulation of knowledge about the prison and the international fora of expert communities in penology to the regimes and the everyday life in penal institutions. The discussion at the conference will be structured along the following seven sections: Section 1: Historiographical Concepts The first section provides a general basis for the subsequent discussions by debating possible ways of how to combine the history of the modern prison with the perspectives and tools of global history, how global history perspectives blend in with established interpretative patterns of the historiography of the modern prison. Up for discussion are the concepts of global history, their purposes and forms of knowledge production as well as the analytical potentials that they are able to generate and the methodological challenges they pose. Promises of global history approaches for new and fundamental insights into the history of punishment will be outlined, while their limits for explaining the historical development of penal regimes will be identified. Section 2: Early Modern Developments The second section aims at creating another set of foundations for the conference’s main debates. By focussing on early modern transformations of punishment and practices of confinement, the contributions in this panel offer insights into the historical preconditions of the entangled history of the prison under consideration in the other sections. On the one hand, they do so by asking for the cross-border interconnectedness of the development of penal regimes until the late eighteenth century as well as for the geographical and cultural range of these relations. On the other hand, they explore the importance of early modern phenomena of transcultural mobility and exchange – analysing, for example, the role of galleys or port cities – for the history of confinement as a penal sanction from the late eighteenth century onwards. Section 3: Knowledge and Practices The observation of a discrepancy between theory and practice has not only become a topos in the historiography about modern penal systems but in many cases also preconfigured the perspectives of research. Beyond the confirmation of a chasm between the penological norms and everyday life behind the walls, a promising global history approach to the history of the prison depends rather on a close examination of the interconnectedness of penal knowledge and practice. Modern prisons were not only sites where ideas and norms of punishment were implemented but also important places of the production of knowledge about criminality and the ways to combat it. Penological know - how was fundamentally based on experiences made within the penal systems. Perceived failures and shortcomings in the organisation of confinement gave important impulses for the furt her development of penal regimes and the search for alternatives. Around the world, prisons served as laboratories where the effects of means of punishment on criminals were tested. Prisons were not only the places where the globally circulating knowledge about punishment manifested itself but also an important source of penological know - how and concepts. The panel looks closely at concrete interdependencies of knowledge about imprisonment and penal practices and discusses their relevance for the development of penal regimes across borders. Section 4: Imprisonment and the Law Penal reforms from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century were part of a wider process of modernization of social control. With the rise of the secular nation state, the dealing with deviancy and violations of norms became subject to profound transformations. The increasingly centralised bureaucratic apparatus of punishment developed in close interconnection with the creation and advancement of national – or colonial – legal systems. The study of the interrelations between criminal law and penal systems is therefore a crucial element for an adequate understanding of prison reform – whether in the contexts of European or US-American state developments, of elite endeavours to modernise society and the state along the lines of Western models in Latin America or the Far East, or of colonial civilising missions. The fourth section thus discusses the interconnectedness of the history of law and the history of punishment in its border-crossing dimensions, aiming, not least, at a more precise comprehension of the ways in which transfers of knowledge and norms, of penological know-how and legal concepts, – together with the circulation of ideas about criminality – among continents and regions became effective in manifold combinations for local developments of penal institutions and regimes. Section 5: Actors of Transfers The study of interactions requires the identification of the relevant actors participating in processes of entanglement. This is true for every level of this history, from single penal institutions to the exchange of ideas of modern imprisonment on a global scale. The range of actors extended far beyond the notorious protagonists of the prison reform movement who corresponded regularly along their border-crossing networks, visited penal institutions in other countries, contributed to the debates with journal articles and books, met regularly in international congresses and administered prisons in different parts of the world. The knowledge and status of the members of the transnational expert community in “prison science” were directly linked to experiences in penal institutions. Within these institutions, not only the administrators and warders but also the inmates exercised power, shaped prison life and there by took partin the production and circulation of knowledge about criminality and penal regimes. An anal ysis of the transfers of knowledge and norms has to include the identification of the participating individuals, groups or institutions, and the documentation of the interests involved. The fifth section is therefore dedicated to the study of the role of different actors in the entangled discussions about the modern prison as well as the circulation of practices of penal regimes. Section 6: Entangled Histories of Prison Systems While in the third section the studies of knowledge transfers and their interactions with the practices of penal regimes focus on the micro-level of exchange and on specific bodies of knowledge, the sixth section deals with the significance of cross-border interactions from a broader perspective. The circulation of knowledge, norms, ideas and values within and between Europe, the Americas, Asia and towards the end of the nineteenth century also increasingly Africa created far-reaching frames of reference in which actors negotiated local developments of penal regimes. The contributions in this panel analyse transformations of national or colonial prison systems in their entanglements with prison reform in distant spaces and the global frameworks of penological discourses. They examine the concrete ways in which ideas and knowledge about the modern prison were transferred over long distances and assess the significance of these border-crossing interconnections for the development of penal regimes in specific national, imperial or colonial contexts in Europe, the Americas, Asia and Africa. Section 7: Imprisonment in Penal Context The prison not only coexisted with other forms of punishment, but developed with and alongside them. Forms of punishment frequently perceived as pre-modern were not only phenomena of a contemporaneity of the non-contemporaneous, but were modernised and integrated into new means of punishment. Corporal and capital punishments, for example, were administered not least within prison walls. Transportation, penal colonies or convict labour were also closely interconnected with imprisonment. Since an appropriate understanding of the emergence and the development of the modern prison is impossible without taking into consideration its interrelatedness with other forms of punishment, the seventh section is dedicated to the analysis of this kind of entanglements. It does so with a particular focus on their long-distance and transcultural dimensions whose importance is epitomised, for example, by the frequently addressed links between the transportation of convicts to the colonies and the creation of the very first penitentiaries in England, one of the „motherlands” of prison reform.