Cultures of Confinement

Prisons are on the increase from the United States to China, as ever-larger proportions of humanity find themselves behind bars. While prisons now span the world, we know little about their history in global perspective. Rather than interpreting the prison's proliferation as the predictable result of globalization, Cultures of Confinement underlines the fact that the prison was never simply imposed by colonial powers or copied by elites eager to emulate the West, but was reinvented and transformed by a host of local factors, its success being dependent on its very flexibility. Complex cultural negotiations took place in encounters between different parts of the world, and rather than assigning a passive role to Latin America, Asia, and Africa, the authors of this book point out the acts of resistance or appropriation that altered the social practices associated with confinement. The prison, in short, was understood in culturally specific ways and reinvented in a variety of local contexts examined here for the first time in global perspective.

"Cultures of Confinement adds substantially and impressively to the already vast bulk of writing about prisons—bringing together in a single volume surveys of prison experience in most parts of the world beyond Europe and North America, and thus making it possible for the first time for readers to begin to grasp the shape of the global history of the modern prison."

Frank Dikötter is Professor of the Modern History of China at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. He is the author of The Discourse of Race in Modern China; Crime, Punishment and the Prison in Modern China; and Exotic Commodities: Modern Objects and Everyday Life in China. Ian Brown is Professor of the Economic History of South East Asia at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. His most recent book is A Colonial Economy in Crisis: Burma's Rice Cultivators and the World Depression of the 1930s.