The Empire’s Edge- Exporting Pain to Colonial Spaces by Wyatt Wiggins

Hello everyone, it’s great to be back. In the first episode of our three-part mini series, we stayed in the centre of the French state. In the public square and in the scaffold. But also in a world where punishment had to be visible in order to function—where violence was not hidden behind institutions, but instead staged in front of crowds as a potent form of political communication and state presence.

In our last episode, we ended our story with a slow transition: where punishment moved away from spectacle, and moved ever-increasingly towards an administrative framework. But perhaps, even more important, the logic of punishment itself moved away from viewing the body as the primary site of where punishment should be exercised, and instead shifted toward systems that prioritized records, classification, and of course, surveillance.

But that transition raises a question that sits underneath everything that follows. If punishment begins to disappear from the public square… where does it go? Because of course, punishing crime does not vanish from metropolitan spaces. It is still present, but piecemeal, where various departments police crimes differently. But the debates about penal reform do affect what happens within continental France, despite the regional and local variation in punishing practices. However, the effect of those debates seems to have a more limited meaning in colonial spaces, where punishment remains more spectacular, and more brutal.

Even the colonies themselves become an important technology of punishment, where we see an increase in people being deported to the colonies for various crimes. This hints at a larger, more complicated picture, where colonial spaces themselves become integrated into what Michel Foucault would describe as the carceral archipelago—or the network of state institutions such as army barracks, schools, hospitals, prisons, and colonial settlements, where disciplinary principles are applied to produce docile soldiers, pupils, patients, and colonial subjects.

So in this episode, I want to focus on this outwardly shifting frame—from Paris to Saint-Domingue, Guadeloupe, Martinique, and French Guiana. Not as peripheral territories, but as spaces where the French state experiments with new methods of organizing coercion, especially at a time when it becomes harder to sustain visible and sovereign violence at the centre.

And one of the first things we need to keep in mind is that empire writ large is not simply expansion when it comes to punishment. It is also displacement, or a tool for moving politically sensitive forms of violence away from metropolitan visibility, while also preserving them as tools of governance.

But it is also something more specific than that. Empire is a laboratory, a place where legal categories that are becoming difficult to sustain in the metropole can be stretched, re-engineered, or even suspended. And this matters because by the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, France was already in the middle of a profound transformation in how punishment was justified. Torture is being criticised. Public execution is becoming politically unstable. And Enlightenment thinkers are insisting that punishment should be rational, proportional, and administrative rather than theatrical, arbitrary, and retaliatory.

And yet, none of this reduces the state’s need to control colonized populations overseas. So instead, coercion changes form. It changes location. It changes visibility. This is where empire becomes essential. Because empire solves a problem that the metropole is increasingly unable to reconcile directly: how to maintain coercive power while simultaneously claiming moral and legal restraint. And one of the ways this becomes visible is through the circulation of populations who are understood to be no longer fully governable within metropolitan space. In addition to convicts and political detainees, this includes sex workers, who in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France become increasingly targeted by policing regimes that combine moral regulation with urban administration.

But rather than being managed solely within cities like Paris, Marseille, or Bordeaux, these women are sometimes displaced into colonial circuits, connecting metropolitan policing to colonial territories such as Saint-Domingue, Guadeloupe, and Martinique.

What matters here is not just moral regulation or legal control. It is spatial logic. Certain populations begin to be treated as problems that cannot be solved in place. They must be moved. And empire becomes the infrastructure of that movement. But once we follow that movement outward, we immediately encounter something more complex. Because colonial governance is not simply a continuation of metropolitan law. It is a different kind of legal space altogether. A space defined not by uniform application of law, but by fragmentation. And one of the best ways to understand this is to begin in Saint-Domingue.

Saint-Domingue is often described as the jewel of the French empire in the eighteenth century. It is extraordinarily wealthy, driven by plantation agriculture and enslaved labour, and deeply integrated into Atlantic trade networks. But beneath that economic surface lies a fragmented and highly unstable system of governance. On paper, Saint-Domingue is governed by the French crown and structured by the Code Noir, which defines the legal framework of slavery, discipline, religious practice, and the obligations of masters toward enslaved people. But in practice, enforcement is distributed across multiple overlapping authorities.

Recent scholarship, including work by Isabelle Merle and Marine Coquet on penal regimes in the French empire, has shown that colonial justice systems are rarely unified legal structures. Instead, they operate as deeply layered punitive spaces, where different authorities—administrative, military, private, and judicial—overlap and compete rather than integrate into a coherent system.

In Saint-Domingue, this means that punishment is not monopolised by the state, but rather dispersed. At the most basic level, plantation owners are responsible for policing enslaved people themselves. The plantation is not just an economic unit, but also a carceral landscape that includes surveillance, discipline, and punishment.

The Code Noir formally regulates this system, even attempting to impose limits on excessive violence. But in practice, enforcement depends on local power relations rather than central authority. At the same time, free people of color and white colonists are drawn into the enforcement of order. They are encouraged, and sometimes incentivised, to report infractions, participate in surveillance, and maintain colonial discipline. What emerges is not a state that monopolises violence, but a society in which violence is distributed across social relations.

A form of governance in which participation in coercion becomes structurally normalised. And yet even this is not enough to maintain control. Because Saint-Domingue is also a space of movement, resistance, and flight. Plantation slavery produces maroon communities—groups of formerly enslaved people who escape plantation control and establish autonomous zones in mountainous terrain. And this creates a constant problem for colonial authorities: how to govern a population that is always partially disappearing from view. This is where the maréchaussées become central.

These colonial guard forces operate across plantations, forests, and difficult terrain. They are tasked with surveillance, pursuit, and enforcement across a geography that resists control. They are not a modern police force in the bureaucratic sense. They are a hybrid institution combining military force, civilian participation, and local knowledge. And importantly, they are racially and socially mixed.

White colonists, free people of color, and enslaved individuals all participate in different roles within these forces. As historical accounts show, this is not incidental. It is structural. It reflects the colonial need to distribute coercive labour across populations in ways that match both capacity and hierarchy. Gene Ogle’s work on colonial policing highlights how these forces often operate far from settlements, engaging in long patrols through forests and mountainous regions, pursuing maroon communities under conditions that blur the line between policing and military campaign.

But even here, something more specific is happening. Because colonial policing is not only about authority. It is about endurance. Émilien Petit’s observation that men of color were often recruited into these patrols because white soldiers could not withstand the physical demands of repeated nocturnal pursuits reveals something important about how colonial systems function.

They are not only racial systems of hierarchy. They are racial systems of workload distribution. Even exhaustion becomes part of governance. But colonial punishment does not end with policing. It extends into execution itself. Because in Saint-Domingue, enslaved people are not only subject to law enforcement. They are also sometimes incorporated into its most extreme form. Beyond participation in patrol forces, enslaved individuals are frequently employed as éxecuteurs de la haute-justice—executioners of high justice. What Cécile Vidal has described as “the black arm of the law.”

This is not symbolic. It is structural. As Moreau de Saint-Méry records, there is a consistent colonial practice of selecting executioners from among enslaved individuals already condemned to death. In his words, there is a “constant usage of the colonies to take the executioners of high justice from among slaves condemned to die.” Marc-Antoine Caillot similarly observes that it is “ordinarily negroes who perform this job in the colonies.”

And what Cécile Vidal highlights in her analysis is precisely the political contradiction embedded here: enslaved people become necessary agents of colonial justice while remaining legally defined as property. They are simultaneously instruments of sovereign power and objects of it.

This is what scholars in critical race theory often describe as contingent inclusion. A form of inclusion in which marginalized groups are incorporated into systems of power, labour, or governance, but only in ways that reinforce their subordinate status rather than transforming it.

They are included, but only as tools. Included, but only in ways that stabilise the existing hierarchy. Included, without altering the fundamental structure of inequality. And nowhere is this more visible than in colonial punishment systems, where participation in coercion does not grant political agency, but rather reinforces the very conditions of exclusion. This produces a disturbing internal logic.

The condemned are transformed into agents of punishment. Violence is circulated through bodies already marked for destruction. Justice becomes a system of reproduction rather than resolution. In Martinique, similar logics appear in the transformation of punishment itself. Capital punishment for runaway slaves is sometimes replaced with branding on the cheek, shifting the function of punishment from elimination to inscription. From death to permanent visibility.

And across the French Atlantic world, including Louisiana, we see enslaved executioners such as Louis Congo incorporated into colonial legal systems in ways that make them both instruments and subjects of punishment simultaneously. Across all of these cases, punishment is not simply imposed from above. It is redistributed through the very populations it governs. But colonial punishment is not only about enforcement. It is also about displacement.

And here we need to turn more directly to the work of Miranda Spieler, whose analysis of deportation and penal transportation to French Guiana helps clarify a crucial transformation in French imperial governance. Spieler shows that French colonial punishment in the nineteenth century does not simply rely on imprisonment or execution. It increasingly relies on relocation across imperial space. But this is not just geographic movement. It is legal transformation.

What emerges is a system in which deportation functions as a mechanism for producing what we might call a colonial legal underworld. A space where law still exists, but in altered form. Where legal identity becomes unstable. Where categories of citizenship, criminality, and belonging can be reorganised through movement itself. In French Guiana, this takes the form of penal regimes that combine incarceration, forced labour, exile, and administrative abandonment. Individuals are not only punished. They are removed into systems where their legal status is permanently altered, and their visibility to the metropole is dissolved or severely weakened. And this is crucial. Because deportation is not simply removal. It is unmaking. A way of dismantling legal identity through spatial separation.

Once this logic is established, it expands. Across the Caribbean. Across the Atlantic. Across the French empire. And what ties Saint-Domingue, Martinique, Guadeloupe, and French Guiana together is not uniform law. It is uneven sovereignty.

A system in which the metropole increasingly defines itself through ideals of legality, rationality, and restraint, while colonial spaces operate as zones where those ideals are selectively suspended, modified, or reinterpreted. And this is where the deeper structure of modern punishment becomes visible. Because punishment in the metropole increasingly requires restraint in appearance. It must be rational. Administrative. Non-spectacular.

But that restraint is only possible because coercion is being displaced elsewhere. And empire becomes the space that absorbs what the metropole cannot easily display. So if the first episode was about punishment as spectacle in the square, this episode is about punishment as circulation across empire. Not disappearing. Not diminishing. But expanding across space in ways that make it less visible and more difficult to trace. And increasingly, more difficult to contain. Because once punishment becomes something that can be relocated rather than displayed, the question is no longer simply how the state punishes.

It becomes where punishment is allowed to exist. And who is allowed to remain visible to it. Now, what becomes especially important when we look closely at colonial Saint-Domingue is that this system of punishment is not only brutal—it is also constantly contested, negotiated, and defended through competing claims to authority. One of the clearest examples of this tension appears in the case of Nicolas LaJeune, a coffee planter in Saint-Domingue. On the surface, this might look like an isolated incident of plantation violence, but it actually reveals something much deeper about the fragility of colonial legal order.

The case begins when around ten enslaved people escape from a plantation dungeon. And it is important to pause on that word—dungeon. Because these were not exceptional spaces in colonial Saint-Domingue. Dungeons existed on many plantations. They were part of the ordinary architecture of control: subterranean spaces used for confinement, punishment, and the isolation of enslaved people deemed rebellious or disruptive. But in this case, something unusual happens.

The escaped enslaved people do not simply flee into the forest. They go directly to colonial authorities and give testimony. They describe what they claim to have witnessed inside LaJeune’s dungeon: women chained inside, subjected to sustained violence. According to their account, LaJeune ordered enslaved workers to collect wax from trees, heat it, and pour it onto these women as a form of punishment.

What emerges is not just violence, but a kind of improvised technological cruelty—punishment constructed from plantation materials, enacted outside formal legal sanction, but within a space that plantation owners nevertheless considered their domain.

The colonial authorities respond seriously. An official investigation is launched, and even the king’s prosecuting attorney from another part of the island is brought in to examine the case. The dungeon is inspected directly.

Inside, they find confirmation of parts of the testimony. One of the women is found dead, still chained to the wall. Another has severe gangrenous injuries on her leg and thigh, consistent with prolonged untreated burns and infection.

LaJeune defends himself by claiming that the enslaved people were attempting to poison others on the plantation, and that his actions were therefore a form of necessary security. But no evidence supports this claim. And yet what is most revealing is not only the violence or the investigation. It is what happens next. A significant number of other planters intervene on LaJeune’s behalf. Not necessarily because they condone his actions. But because they oppose the idea that royal or judicial authorities should intervene in plantation discipline at all.

What is at stake is jurisdiction. Whether the crown has the right to regulate the internal coercive practices of plantation life. And under this pressure, the case collapses. No meaningful punishment follows. What this reveals is that colonial power is not a unified system of domination. It is a field of competing sovereignties—between metropolitan law, colonial administrators, and planter elites who actively resist external interference.

And this matters because it complicates any simple narrative of colonial order as coherent or fully controlled. Instead, what we see is something much more unstable. A system in which violence is simultaneously enabled and contested. Where law is asserted but also resisted. And where punishment is never fully settled in meaning or application. And it is precisely this instability that allows colonial punishment to function at scale. Because it does not need to be consistent. It only needs to be continuous.

And now, as we step back from all of this, what begins to emerge is something more difficult to contain within a simple story of penal evolution. Because when we include the colonial dimension, punishment stops looking like a linear transformation from spectacle to discipline, from cruelty to rationality, from bodies to institutions.

Instead, what we see is a system that is constantly reorganising itself across space. In the metropole, punishment increasingly presents itself as restrained, bureaucratic, and procedural. In the colonies, punishment remains more visible, more flexible, and more directly tied to coercion. But these are not separate histories.

They are interdependent. Each makes the other possible. The restraint of metropolitan punishment depends on the availability of colonial violence. And colonial violence is legitimised, in part, by the language of metropolitan reform. This is the deeper complication that emerges once we bring empire into the story.

Punishment is not becoming simply less violent over time. It is becoming spatially distributed in ways that allow different forms of violence to coexist under a single imperial system. And that means that modern punishment cannot be understood only through prisons, codes, or legal reforms within France itself. It has to be understood through movement. Through displacement. Through the circulation of bodies, categories, and coercive practices across imperial space. Because once punishment is understood in this way, the central question changes. It is no longer simply how punishment becomes modern. It becomes how modernity organizes its violence in ways that are uneven, distributed, and often deliberately difficult to see. And that is where we are going next. Because once empire becomes the hidden infrastructure of punishment, the question becomes what happens when that infrastructure begins to reshape the metropole itself. When punishment no longer needs the scaffold. No longer needs the colony. And begins to operate through systems that appear, at least on the surface, to have nothing to do with violence at all.