Prison-discipline and the making of racial capitalism in British India, 1857-1930

“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.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

History

Grantor

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2025

Author dc:creator

• Crane, William M.

Contributors dc:contributor

• Burton, Antoinette
• Ali, Tariq O
• Wood, Augustus
• Chattopadhyaya, Utathya

• racial capitalism
• prison-discipline
• colonial India
• colonial Burma

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2025 William Crane

Language dc:language

en, eng

Handle dc:identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/129474

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F129474