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

Michael Offermann Announcement
Location
Switzerland
Subject Fields
Social Sciences, World History / Studies

University of Bern, Department of History

SNSF Professorship, Prof. Dr. Stephan Scheuzger

Conference:

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

September 7 – 10, 2016

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 far-reaching transformation of penal systems?

Existing research on the modern prison in Europe, the United States, Latin America, Asia and Africa 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 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 seven sections. They will deal with

(1) conceptual reflections about the application of global history approaches to the history of the prison,

(2) the importance of early modern phenomena of confinement for the entangled history of the prison in the 19th and 20th centuries,

(3) interdependencies of the production and circulation of knowledge about imprisonment and penal practices,

(4) the interconnectedness of the history of law and the history of punishment in its border-crossing dimensions,

(5) the role of different actors in the entangled discussions about the modern prison and the circulation of practices of penal regimes,

(6) the significance of border-crossing interconnections for the development of prison systems in specific national, imperial or colonial contexts,

(7) the interrelatedness of the prison as a global phenomenon with other forms of punishment such as transportation and corporal punishment.

For detailed information on these sections and on the general concept of the conference see: http://www.hist.unibe.ch/unibe/philhist/hist/content/e254/e258/e262/e343314/e736385/conference_world_of_prisons2_ger.pdf?preview=preview

Paper proposals, outlining a contribution of 25 minutes, should not exceed 700 words. The abstract should be accompanied by a brief biographical note of no more than 1 page detailing the current academic affiliation and past and present research of the applicant. The papers will be delivered in English. Travel and accommodation expenses of conference participants will be covered by the hosts. The publication of an edited volume based on a major part of the conference papers is planned.

Please submit abstract and biographical note in one single .pdf-file by email to: thomas.hirt[at]hist.unibe.ch. The deadline for submissions is September 30, 2015. The receipt of proposals will be confirmed. Applicants will be notified about the acceptance of their proposals in the second half of October.

Contact Information

Thomas Hirt

Historisches Institut, Universität Bern
Länggassstrasse 49

3000 Bern 9, Switzerland

Contact Email
thomas.hirt@hist.unibe.ch