A Global History of Execution and the Criminal Corpse

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. This book has two open access chapters available under a CC BY license.