‘More an Inspiration than a Deterrent’? Capital Punishment and British Colonial Counter-Insurgency, c.1916–1973

Abstract

Abstract Capital punishment operated in the British Empire as the apogee of colonial law and punishment, but during counter-insurgency its role within the wider framework of colonial violence was more contested. This chapter provides the first comparative analysis of the role of the death penalty in British late-colonial counter-insurgency, focusing on the targeting and timing of the use of executions. It demonstrates how rather than just a legal sentence, capital punishment was an expressly political penalty whose use was shaped by shifting socio-political climates, military contexts, and legal frameworks. Both capital sentencing and executions themselves had multiple functions—gathering intelligence, deterrence, individual punishment, revenge—because the death penalty had multiple audiences: insurgents, colonized society, settlers and security forces, imperial authority, and public/international opinion. The chapter shows that whilst capital punishment was purported to be a targeted, legalistic assertion of the rule of law, it was in fact an emotional, irrational punishment and a sign of the weakness of colonial states rather than their strength. The shifting usage of capital punishment reveals the significance of the internationalization of anticolonial insurgencies, the growth of human rights discourses, and the vulnerability of British colonial rule to public and international opinion.