Constructing Colonial Difference at the International Penal and Penitentiary Congresses, 1872-1925

Paul Salamanca, University of California, Berkeley

How have transnational and colonial relations shaped the development of penal institutions? Much sociological work has studied the emergence of “modern” penality in the 18th and 19th centuries. Yet this research has often taken the nation as an analytic unit, centering nation-states in Europe and the US. We know little about how relations between nations—and notably during that period, between metropoles and colonies—shaped the “modernization” of punishment. This paper addresses this gap by examining an early forum of global discourse and collaboration around penality: the International Penal and Penitentiary Congresses (IPPC), 1872-1925. The IPPC were a set of conferences where penal officials representing a wide array of metropolitan and colonial states defined the aims and best practices of “modern” punishment. The IPPC generated more than 22,000 pages of conference proceedings, including accepted reports and monographs, and descriptions and transcriptions of sessions. Using Laura Nelson’s (2020) computational grounded theory as a methodological framework, I examine this corpus through both computational text analysis and close archival analysis. Preliminary findings suggest that at IPPC meetings, articulating the difference between metropolitan and colonial punishment—in other words, colonial difference—became crucial to the formation of penality as a domain of policy. These findings help broaden Euro-/US-centric accounts of the “modernization” of penality and build new bridges between the sociologies of penality and empire.

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 Presented in Session 78. Memory, Law, and the Politics of Historical Narrative