Table Of ContentA Global History of Execution and the Criminal Corpse
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A Global History of
Execution and the
Criminal Corpse
Edited by
Richard Ward
University of Sheffield, UK
Editorial matter, introduction and selection © Richard Ward 2015
Remaining chapters © Respective authors 2015
Foreword © Pieter Spierenburg 2015
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2015 978-1-137-44399-1
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be
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The Introduction and Chapter 3 are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
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First published 2015 by
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A global history of execution and the criminal corpse / edited by Richard Ward.
pages cm
Summary: ‘Across many different times and places the criminal corpse has been
harnessed for the ends of state power, medical science, criminal justice, and
political subversion, amongst other things. This collection of essays for the first time
examines execution practice and the punishment of the criminal corpse across a wide
chronological and geographical span, ranging from eighteenth-century England to
nineteenth-century India and twentieth-century Africa. 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 which forces us to
rethink current metanarratives of penal practice and change’—Provided by publisher.
1. Executions and executioners—History. 2. Criminals—Death—History. 3. Capital
punishment—History. I. Ward, Richard, 1984–
HV8551.G56 2015
364.6609—dc23 2015001320
Typeset by MPS Limited, Chennai, India.
Contents
List of Figures and Tables vii
Foreword by Pieter Spierenburg viii
Acknowledgments xiii
Notes on the Contributors xiv
Introduction: A Global History of Execution
and the Criminal Corpse 1
Richard Ward
OPEN This chapter is available open access under a CC BY license
via palgraveconnect.com
1 Punishing the Dead: Execution and the Executed
Body in Eighteenth-Century Ireland 37
James Kelly
2 ‘For the Benefit of Example’: Crime-Scene Executions
in England, 1720–1830 71
Steve Poole
3 The Gibbet in the Landscape: Locating the Criminal
Corpse in Mid-Eighteenth-Century England 102
Zoe Dyndor
OPEN This chapter is available open access under a CC BY license
via palgraveconnect.com
4 Never Equal before Death: Three Experiences
of Dying as Seen Through Eighteenth-Century
French Executions 126
Pascal Bastien
5 The Ill-Treated Body: Punishing and Utilising
the Early Modern Suicide Corpse 147
Alexander Kästner and Evelyne Luef
6 Execution and its Aftermath in the Nineteenth-Century
British Empire 170
Clare Anderson
v
vi Contents
7 Strangled by the Chinese and Kept ‘Alive’ by the British:
Two Infamous Executions and the Discourse of
Chinese Legal Despotism 199
Song-Chuan Chen
8 Dismembering and Remembering the Body: Execution
and Post-Execution Display in Africa, c. 1870–2000 220
Stacey Hynd
9 Burying the Past? The Post-Execution
History of Nazi War Criminals 249
Caroline Sharples
Bibliography 272
Name Index 301
Subject Index 305
List of Figures and Tables
Figures
2.1 Crime-scene executions in England, 1720–1830
(five-year moving average) 76
2.2 Recorded crime-scene executions in England, 1720–1830 80
2.3 A View of the Procession of John Swan and Elizabeth
Jefferies Going to the Place of Execution (London, 1752),
© The Trustees of the British Museum 92
8.1 A. H. Zaki, The Modern Civilization of Europe (1908–14),
© Corbis 231
Tables
3.1 Numbers of smugglers convicted at the Old Bailey,
Sussex and Kent Assizes, and the punishments
they received, 1747–51 105
3.2 Smugglers hung in chains, 1747–9 105
vii
Foreword
Can we learn something new about the subject of executions? With
this volume in hand, I would definitely say yes. To begin with, there
are the often surprising or intriguing details. We hear about the playing
of bagpipes during a procession with heads upon the points of swords;
about surgeons entering a house where a murder took place in order
to dissect, not the victim, but the perpetrator; about the precision and
workmanship required for the production of a cage for hanging a body
in chains; about an English scholar recommending parts of the Qing
Code to European nations; about the impracticality of putting human
corpses on display in a country where they would attract leopards and
lions; and about a British lieutenant colonel hesitatingly removing
flowers from a German gravesite. To remain in Germany, the third of
these cases reminds me of perhaps the most notorious person in history
to be gibbeted: Joseph Oppenheimer, the original Jud Süss. As the Jewish
financial advisor to the Catholic Duke of Württemberg, he fell victim
to his Protestant opponents after the Duke’s demise, which resulted in
a death sentence in 1738. For the exposure of Oppenheimer’s executed
body, which turned out to last for 6 years, his judges had a special con-
struction made with a cage on top of the gallows, to belie his statement
that ‘they cannot hang me higher than the gallows’.
As I was writing this foreword, the emotions generated by the spectacle
of disintegrated bodies, this time of innocent persons, forced themselves
upon me in connection with the downing of flight MH17 in Eastern
Ukraine. Even though the media sensibly refrained from showing too
explicit pictures, the stories – about the possessions of passengers lying
scattered in the fields or about bodies in a train waiting to be transported –
were horrific enough. Of course, most of us are unaccustomed to the
sight of anything other than a deceased person dear to us, nicely visaged,
before or during a funeral. About the emotions of spectators in the past,
with few exceptions, we can only make inferences. Yet, it is likely that
the occasional instances of hanging in chains or crime-scene executions
in early nineteenth-century England generated mixed feelings at least.
Even as early as the beginning of the sixteenth century the custom of
preserving the dead hand of a murder victim was said to be offensive to
the relatives and therefore abolished. Some manifestations of uneasiness
in the presence of (parts of) corpses, then, date back a long time.
viii
Foreword ix
The coverage of this volume, however, extends beyond the British
Isles. One of its major assets is the view from outside Europe offered
in several chapters. This tunes in to a new trend in the historiography
of crime and criminal justice. Increasingly, this sub-discipline adopts
a global perspective, examining the differences and similarities with
respect to various developments throughout the world. The trend is vis-
ible in new themes such as colonial policing, for example. This theme
allows for comparing the initiatives taken by various colonial powers
as well as the interactions with the local population in each of the
areas concerned. The history of imprisonment and labour camps, too,
is being studied now from a global perspective. This applies with equal
force to various forms of violence. Take, for example, the murders, pros-
ecuted in several colonial African countries, that were associated with
local beliefs about the healing powers of corpses or body parts. Violence
is equally a subject of study when it comes to independent non-Western
states such as China, where the history of banditry and rebellion have
come under scrutiny. Latin America, too, constitutes a particularly
promising area for the study of all kinds of bloodshed, from political
murder to gangs and the ‘disappeared’.1 Finally, the comparative history
of genocidal episodes forms part of this global endeavour. As a result,
scholars have come to realise that massacres occur in all periods of his-
tory and that, moreover, they demanded at least as many lives, relative
to the total population, in the more distant past than during the last
150 years or so.
Three chapters of this volume apply crime and justice history’s global
perspective to the study of executions and post-execution practices. They
take us to all corners of the British Empire in the nineteenth century, to
pre- as well as post-colonial Africa and to late-Imperial China. Thus, we
hear about Western dismay when around 1800 Chinese Emperors occa-
sionally sanctioned a sentence of strangulation for a European offender.
This prompted European scholars at the time to develop the theory of
legal despotism reigning in China. Whereas Chinese executions were
carried out without much ceremony, capital punishment in the Ashanti
kingdom was accompanied by elaborate rituals that served to underline
the power of the state.2 Under colonialism the intertwinement of pun-
ishment and slavery was conspicuous. Slaves usually received harsher
penalties than free persons for the same crimes. Interestingly, British
colonial authorities often based the punishments they meted out on
their knowledge of local beliefs and fears. In Mauritius they decided to
keep the guillotine that their French predecessors had used, because it
instilled a heightened fear in the native population due to their belief
