Punishment, Labour and the Legitimation of Power

This volume draws the outlines of a new field of scholarship at the crossroads of the social histories of punishment and labour. It poses key questions: What is “punishment” and how is it legitimized? In particular, how do punitive practices contribute to shape the processes of labour extraction and workers’ mobility? Based on empirically grounded research on a wide range of geographical and temporal contexts, this volume provides important insights on these questions and on the ways through which they can be studied. It highlights the need to pluralize both punishment and labour, moving beyond the standard focus on incarceration and wage labour. It invites to produce contextualized studies of the processes of coercion and the relations between multiple actors, rather than starting from predefined categories of labour and punishment. And it foregrounds the importance of the simultaneous analysis of processes of mobilization and immobilization of the workforce.

About the Author

Adam Fagbore is a Lecturer in Egyptology at the University of Bonn. His research interests include labour history, social relations, and punishment in Pharaonic Egypt. He most recently acted as the editor for a special issue of the International Review of Social History entitled Punishing Workers, Managing Labour (2023). Nabhojeet Sen is a Doctoral researcher and Research Associate in the Research Group, Punishment, Labour and Dependency, at the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies (BCDSS). His research interests lie in histories of labour and social history of punishment, crime and coercion with a special focus on early modern and early colonial South Asia. Katherine Roscoe is a Lecturer in Criminology at the University of Liverpool. Her research interests include punitive mobilities, unfree labour, and racial inequalities in the British Empire. Her PhD in history from the University of Leicester (2017) won the Boydell & Brewer Prize for Best Dissertation in Maritime History.