{"id":{"repo_id":"uiuc","oai_identifier":"oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/129474"},"canonical_url":"https://search.dev.ndltd.org/etd/uiuc/oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/129474","repository":{"repo_id":"uiuc","name":"University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign","base_url":"https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh"},"display":{"title":"Prison-discipline and the making of racial capitalism in British India, 1857-1930","abstract":"Submission original under an indefinite embargo labeled 'Open Access'. The submission was exported from vireo on 2025-10-19 without embargo terms","abstract_html":"Submission original under an indefinite embargo labeled 'Open Access'. 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The submission was exported from vireo on 2025-10-19 without embargo terms","The student, William Crane, accepted the attached license on 2025-05-01 at 19:06.","The student, William Crane, submitted this Dissertation for approval on 2025-05-01 at 19:12.","This Dissertation was approved for publication on 2025-05-02 at 14:50.","DSpace SAF Submission Ingestion Package generated from Vireo submission #22165 on 2025-10-19 at 18:19:47","“Prison-Discipline and the Making of Racial Capitalism in British India, 1857-1930” expands upon the work of historians concerned with Indian colonial capitalism and penology in the late nineteenth-early twentieth century. Using the theory of racial capitalism which historians and cultural theorists have generated and established the primacy of in the fields of U.S. and more broadly Atlantic historiography, I argue that the prison was a central site in which capitalist production and its ideological effects were modeled for Indian and Burmese natives. In Bengal, the oldest province of British India, the jail system was extensively remodeled during the career of Dr. Frederic J. Mouat, who advocated making prisons centers of industrial production as a way to leverage the superstitious, caste-bound Indian native into modernity. Mouat’s efforts were a practical series of improvisations in jail discipline that he afterwards presented as a fully functioning system of penal reform. Some jails, notably Alipore Central Jail and Presidency Central Jail in Calcutta, became manufacturing enterprises, specifically for juteweaving and printing. However, the “Mouat system” had many detractors among the bureaucracy which did not understand it as real prison discipline, and its capitalist character was limited by the role of a public department and the failure of Indian ex-convicts to take up industrial labor. In Burma, the newest province of India, the jail operated on the frontlines of counterinsurgency, and Mouat’s schemes of industrial jails were not particularly relevant. His efforts were ultimately more important as creating part of the archive which contributed to colonial knowledge of the races of the subcontinent. Jails which could be financially selfsupporting and hope reforming value of industrial labor on the convict, were never introduced to Burma. However, the practice of recruiting Indians from the subcontinent as prison guards combined with an innovation of Mouat’s, the promotion of convict officers to help manage their fellow convicts, to create a system of racialized mass incarceration which was a site of Indian cocolonization of Burma, with its effects on Indo-Bamar racial tension going down to the present."]},{"key":"dc:format","label":"Dc Format","values":["application/pdf"]},{"key":"dc:title","label":"Title","values":["Prison-discipline and the making of racial capitalism in British India, 1857-1930"]}]}],"canonical_facts":{"dc:contributor":["Burton, Antoinette","Ali, Tariq O","Wood, Augustus","Chattopadhyaya, Utathya"],"dc:creator":["Crane, William M."],"dc:date":["2025-05-02","2025-05"],"dc:description":["Submission original under an indefinite embargo labeled 'Open Access'. The submission was exported from vireo on 2025-10-19 without embargo terms","The student, William Crane, accepted the attached license on 2025-05-01 at 19:06.","The student, William Crane, submitted this Dissertation for approval on 2025-05-01 at 19:12.","This Dissertation was approved for publication on 2025-05-02 at 14:50.","DSpace SAF Submission Ingestion Package generated from Vireo submission #22165 on 2025-10-19 at 18:19:47","“Prison-Discipline and the Making of Racial Capitalism in British India, 1857-1930” expands upon the work of historians concerned with Indian colonial capitalism and penology in the late nineteenth-early twentieth century. Using the theory of racial capitalism which historians and cultural theorists have generated and established the primacy of in the fields of U.S. and more broadly Atlantic historiography, I argue that the prison was a central site in which capitalist production and its ideological effects were modeled for Indian and Burmese natives. In Bengal, the oldest province of British India, the jail system was extensively remodeled during the career of Dr. Frederic J. Mouat, who advocated making prisons centers of industrial production as a way to leverage the superstitious, caste-bound Indian native into modernity. Mouat’s efforts were a practical series of improvisations in jail discipline that he afterwards presented as a fully functioning system of penal reform. Some jails, notably Alipore Central Jail and Presidency Central Jail in Calcutta, became manufacturing enterprises, specifically for juteweaving and printing. However, the “Mouat system” had many detractors among the bureaucracy which did not understand it as real prison discipline, and its capitalist character was limited by the role of a public department and the failure of Indian ex-convicts to take up industrial labor. In Burma, the newest province of India, the jail operated on the frontlines of counterinsurgency, and Mouat’s schemes of industrial jails were not particularly relevant. His efforts were ultimately more important as creating part of the archive which contributed to colonial knowledge of the races of the subcontinent. Jails which could be financially selfsupporting and hope reforming value of industrial labor on the convict, were never introduced to Burma. However, the practice of recruiting Indians from the subcontinent as prison guards combined with an innovation of Mouat’s, the promotion of convict officers to help manage their fellow convicts, to create a system of racialized mass incarceration which was a site of Indian cocolonization of Burma, with its effects on Indo-Bamar racial tension going down to the present."],"dc:format":["application/pdf"],"dc:identifier":["https://hdl.handle.net/2142/129474"],"dc:language":["en","eng"],"dc:rights":["Copyright 2025 William Crane"],"dc:subject":["racial capitalism","prison-discipline","colonial India","colonial Burma"],"dc:title":["Prison-discipline and the making of racial capitalism in British India, 1857-1930"],"dc:type":["text","Thesis"],"thesis:degree_discipline":["History"],"thesis:degree_level":["Dissertation"],"thesis:degree_name":["Ph.D."],"thesis:institution_name":["University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign"]},"updated_at":"2026-07-22T22:25:05Z"}