Reflection

As the editors state in their introduction, this book aims to contribute to the further development of historical criminology within an imperial context. As a collection, the foregoing studies offer wide-ranging insights into particular aspects of imperial crime and control. They illuminate intellectual, institutional and practical formations of criminal justice and social control under empire, as well as the experiences of individuals subject to such regimes. Beyond their substantive contribution, though, these works suggest directions for further developing historical understandings of crime and criminal justice more widely. Thinking from within imperial contexts, the contributors to this collection raise questions about the historical dynamics of crime and criminal justice, the ways in which regimes of control are reproduced and sustained over time, their historical legacies stretching down to the present and what may be occluded from imperial memory.