‘A Vast and Extended Web’

Chapter 1 examines connections between abolition debates and legislation in Britain and the decisions of colonial administrations to amend, retain or abolish the death penalty in the 1950s and 1960s. The British government made only limited efforts to promote abolition across the Empire and readily accepted arguments made by governors, political and judicial appointees and elected lawmakers for retaining executions. The course of imperial abolition was consequently uneven in ways that reflected the diversity of colonial legal and penal cultures, crime control concerns, constitutional arrangements and political dynamics, and which saw racialized systems of colonial penal violence persist into the abolition era. Yet even in colonies where the death penalty was retained into the 1970s and beyond, death sentences were upheld in an increasingly narrow range of murder cases. In some jurisdictions, this shift predated British abolition and indicates a more pervasive and dispersed turn against capital punishment across the Empire than is captured in statute laws alone.