The colonized world is a world divided in two. The dividing line, the border, is marked by barracks and police stations.

—Frantz Fanon, Les Damnés de la terre

Colonial punishment is of special theoretical and historical interest when it comes to conceptualizing the penal state for three reasons. First, under imperial rule, state violence is suffusive, explosive and multifaceted, woven into the fabric of the colonial economy, society and polity.footnote¹ Legal and extralegal force are closely enmeshed, as are military and civilian agencies tasked with delivering them. Second, the colonial Leviathan is the quintessence of the racial state: it fashions and defends naturalized social difference and hierarchy. So its erection and operation reveal the organic connection between punishment and race as two interlocking forms of material suasion and public dishonour. Racial hierarchy finds its official expression in the juridical duality of European citizen and native subject. Third, the colonial state not only makes maximal recourse to punishment, which seeps deep into daily life, irrigates subjectivity and stamps the institutional horizon. It also spawns an array of crimes and criminal sanctions specific to imperial possessions that circumvent, indeed violate, the constitutional principles and legal provisions operative in the metropole.

My first contention in this article is simple and straightforward: penality was central to colonial statecraft and assumed distinctive forms in the European periphery—a fact not given its due by the major theorists of imperial rule and routinely ignored by its historians.footnote² Thus, in her state-of-the-art review of research on African colonial states, Heather Sharkey insists on the need to cover ‘a wide of range of actors’ involved in ‘the performance of colonialism’ and to acknowledge the latter’s violence. But she characteristically leaves out of the picture the policeman, the judge and the prison guard, the very agents of official violence.footnote³ To fill this gap, it is moreover essential to capture the labour of law enforcement carried out by the penal triad as such—police, court, prison—as I will endeavour to do here, rather than isolate one or another of its constituents.

My second claim is more controversial and delicate to formulate: the three properties set out above—suffusive official violence, racialization and criminal specificity—infect and inflect the rolling out of the penal state in the urban badlands of advanced society, albeit in a greatly attenuated form. The intensity of criminal construction and sanction is incomparably lower there but their operational logic is analogous, so that one can leverage the colonial experience of a hundred years ago to better understand punishment in the underbelly of the post-industrial metropolis today even while recognizing the many historical caesuras that separate them.footnote⁴ To leverage is not to conflate: the defamed territories inhabited by the urban precariat disproportionately composed of stigmatized ethno-racial categories are emphatically not colonies or postcolonies. But the penal state tends to behave as if they were, and it continually reinvents strategies and techniques formerly deployed in empires because it faces the same practical quandary: how to domesticate an unruly population that does not recognize its authority even as it yearns for democratic recognition and civic inclusion?

Comparative history reveals that penality resides at the very core of the colonial state. It is rolled out, not just to deter, detect and sanction crime, but also, and most crucially, to capture and pacify territory alongside military force; to organize space and limit circulation; to effect economic spoliation and labour exploitation; to extract deference, mark identity and uphold the caste order; and to suppress native political aspirations and claims.footnote⁵ As in the metropole, it is delivered by the official agencies of the police, courts and prisons when and where these are transplanted and adapted to deal with ordinary crimes such as theft, assault, homicide, etc. But, in addition to the army, it is also meted out by variegated civil administrations and their local intermediaries entrusted specifically with the management of native populations, land and affairs, as well as private parties through explicit or tacit delegation. Founded on exacerbated and special powers, colonial penality is moreover in a state of constant tension and extension because the ‘colonial situation’, as deftly articulated by anthropologist Georges Balandier, is fundamentally unstable and thus inevitably threatened by the collective recalcitrance, strategies of resistance and insurgent demands of the colonized.footnote⁶

Like the study of the penal state in the metropolitan core, the study of colonial penality has been hampered by an intellectual disjuncture. On the one side, there is a rich and rapidly growing literature from imperial historians focusing on crime and punishment in colonial societies, but their work scarcely connects with the sociological and legal theories of penality.footnote⁷ It finds its main inspiration, rather, in the writings of Michel Foucault, Frantz Fanon and Giorgio Agamben, as well as in Subaltern studies. On the other side, the colonial domain has been consistently ignored by scholars of punishment—and this criticism applies to my own work—due to the presentist cast of their investigations and the Eurocentrism of their debates. When it timidly enters their purview, it is in terms of contemporary ‘legacies’ and ‘vestiges’ of colonialism rather than its distinctive logics at the bloom of empire.footnote⁸ I propose to bring the history and theory of colonial punishment together to draw lessons for the conceptualization of the penal state and for the analysis of the penal management of subordinate categories in the metropolis of the contemporary West.footnote⁹

What the historian Taylor Sherman calls ‘coercive networks’ anchored by the state were pivotal to the establishment and running of imperial possessions: ‘Far from being limited to a single institution, penal practices ranged from firing on crowds and bombing from the air to dismissal from one’s place of work or study, collective fines, confiscation of property, as well as imprisonment, corporal and capital punishment.’footnote¹⁰ The colonial state was quintessentially a violent state which deployed its police, courts and prisons alongside its military to subordinate, exploit and exclude the populations native to the lands conquered. Its rule was extended by the leeway it granted local intermediaries and private parties such as settlers to use force to do likewise. It is no wonder that the penitentiaries of the colony were prime targets of anticolonial agitation, as when Indian jails were shaken by the wave of mutinies chronicled by Clare Anderson in The Indian Uprising of 1857–8.footnote¹¹