The 19th century is said to be the era of the prisons, penal institutions having spread to most parts of the world as a consequence of European imperialism and colonialism. In the African context, prisons and policing have formed a relatively new field of study, inspired by scholars of American carceral studies and global capitalism.

I am interested in the means and methods by which African communities developed their own carceral practices before (and during) colonial rule, affected by these transitions in global capitalism.

In a 2020 article, “Of Debt and Bondage,” I debunked the thesis that prisons never existed on the African continent before the coming of colonial rule by tracing the emergence of debtor prisons in southern Ghana in the early 19th century. By studying the transformation of financial practices after the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade, I showed that prisons emerged as a solution to the debt crisis of abolition.

In another 2020 article, “Imperial Policing and the Antimonies of Power,” I studied the Wanted Ads of deserted police officers alongside the Wanted Ads for escaped prisoners. I showed that police officers in southern Ghana were often enslaved captives whose freedom the British purchased for service into the police. For this reason, police officers tended to escape the colony in even higher proportions than prisoners.

A third essay, “The Jailhouse Divergence,” explains how and why debtors’ prisons disappeared from Europe and North America at the same time as they expanded across West Africa in the 19th century. This essay argues that, contrary to the thesis that capitalism eventually rendered the debtors’ prison obsolete, in fact the debtors’ prison was important to the emergence of mercantile capitalism in West Africa. The difference between the two world regions may not have owed to capitalism at all; but rather, to the social texture of credit relations, that is, the financial obligations of kinship.

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