Flogging as judicial violence: The colonial rationale of corporal punishment

This chapter considers some of the controversial debates and contexts that justified flogging as a particularly racialized form of judicial punishment in nineteenth-century British settlements. As historians have traced, the declining use of the lash from the 1820s onwards in Britain and its colonies reflected a wider program of humanitarian reform that discouraged the infliction of bodily suffering as an effective means of deterring crime or regulating colonial labour forces. A building Victorian sentiment that flogging was brutalising and demeaning both to the flogged and the flogger placed further limits on its acceptable uses in penal settings. But this turn against corporal punishment did not extend to indigenous subjects, against whom its continuing use staged an important political and symbolic performance of white sovereignty.