A Global History of Execution and the Criminal Corpse

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xvi

   PDF

2. Introduction

   • Richard Ward

   Pages 1-36Open Access

3. Punishing the Dead: Execution and the Executed Body in Eighteenth-Century Ireland

   • James Kelly

   Pages 37-70

4. ‘For the Benefit of Example’: Crime-Scene Executions in England, 1720–1830

   • Steve Poole

   Pages 71-101

5. The Gibbet in the Landscape: Locating the Criminal Corpse in Mid-Eighteenth-Century England

   • Zoe Dyndor

   Pages 102-125Open Access

6. Never Equal before Death: Three Experiences of Dying as Seen Through Eighteenth-Century French Executions

   • Pascal Bastien

   Pages 126-146

7. The Ill-Treated Body: Punishing and Utilising the Early Modern Suicide Corpse

   • Alexander Kästner, Evelyne Luef

   Pages 147-169

8. Execution and its Aftermath in the Nineteenth-Century British Empire

   • Clare Anderson

   Pages 170-198

9. Strangled by the Chinese and Kept ‘Alive’ by the British: Two Infamous Executions and the Discourse of Chinese Legal Despotism

   • Song-Chuan Chen

   Pages 199-219

10. Dismembering and Remembering the Body: Execution and Post-Execution Display in Africa, c. 1870–2000

    • Stacey Hynd

    Pages 220-248

11. Burying the Past? The Post-Execution History of Nazi War Criminals

    • Caroline Sharples

    Pages 249-271

12. Back Matter

    Pages 272-313

    PDF

Through studies of beheaded Irish traitors, smugglers hung in chains on the English coast, suicides subjected to the surgeon's knife in Dresden and the burial of executed Nazi war criminals, this volume provides a fresh perspective on the history of capital punishment. The chapters 'Introduction: A Global History of Execution and the Criminal Corpse' and 'The Gibbet in the Landscape: Locating the Criminal Corpse in Mid-Eighteenth-Century England' are open access under a CC BY 4.0 license.

• Capital punishment
• death penalty
• executions
• hanging
• criminals
• bodies
• global
• international
• global history
• history
• punishment

“A Global History of Execution and the Criminal Corpse is a fascinating set of essays that explore not only the socio-political contexts of the death penalty, but also the fate of the condemned after their deaths. … It will be of interest to scholars of the criminal law, punishment, state-society relations, and the cultural history of death and the body.” (Michael Meranze, Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books, clcjbooks.rutgers.edu, January, 2017)

• University of Sheffield, UK

  Richard Ward

Clare Anderson, University of Leicester, UK Pascal Bastien, Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada Song-Chuan Chen, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore Zoe Dyndor, University of Leicester, UK Stacey Hynd, University of Exeter, UK Alexander Kästner, Technical University Dresden, Germany James Kelly, Dublin City University, Ireland Evelyne Luef, University of Vienna, Austria Steve Poole, University of the West of England, UK Caroline Sharples, University of Sussex, UK

Policies and ethics