The Insanity Of Empire

This poetry collection discusses the Iraq war and some of the ominous implications of that serious step taken by the Republican administration. The collection includes six poems from the author's book on the Vietnam War, as well as a new group of poems discussing the power of the greedy soul or 'the rapacious soul.' Another five poems are in the ghazal form, including 'Call and answer, ' one of the first poems written against the Iraq War.

This book represents the first systematic study of the certification of lunacy in the British Empire. Considering a variety of legal, archival, and published sources, it traces the origins and dissemination of a peculiar method for determining mental unsoundness defined as the ‘Victorian system’. Shaped by the dynamics surrounding the clandestine committal of wealthy Londoners in private madhouses, this system featured three distinctive tenets: standardized forms, independent medical examinations, and written facts of insanity. Despite their complexity, Victorian certificates achieved a remarkable success. Not only did they survive in the UK for more than a century, but they also served as a model for the development of mental health laws around the world. By the start of the Second World War, more than seventy colonial and non-colonial jurisdictions adopted the Victorian formula for making lunacy official with some countries still relying on it to this very day. Using case studies from Europe, the Americas, and the Pacific, this book charts the temporal and geographical trajectory of an imperial technology used to determine a person’s destiny. Shifting the focus from metropolitan policies to colonial dynamics, and from macro developments to micro histories, it explores the perspectives of families, doctors, and public officials as they began to deal with the delicate business of certification. This book will be of interest to scholars working on mental health policy, the history of medicine, disability studies, and the British Empire.

A study of the internal tensions of British imperial rule told through murder and insanity trials Unsound Empire is a history of criminal responsibility in the nineteenth‑century British Empire told through detailed accounts of homicide cases across three continents. If a defendant in a murder trial was going to hang, he or she had to deserve it. Establishing the mental element of guilt--criminal responsibility--transformed state violence into law. And yet, to the consternation of officials in Britain and beyond, experts in new scientific fields posited that insanity was widespread and growing, and evolutionary theories suggested that wide swaths of humanity lacked the self‑control and understanding that common law demanded. Could it be fair to punish mentally ill or allegedly "uncivilized" people? Could British civilization survive if killers avoided the noose?

A study of the internal tensions of British imperial rule told through murder and insanity trials Unsound Empire is a history of criminal responsibility in the nineteenth‑century British Empire told through detailed accounts of homicide cases across three continents. If a defendant in a murder trial was going to hang, he or she had to deserve it. Establishing the mental element of guilt—criminal responsibility—transformed state violence into law. And yet, to the consternation of officials in Britain and beyond, experts in new scientific fields posited that insanity was widespread and growing, and evolutionary theories suggested that wide swaths of humanity lacked the self‑control and understanding that common law demanded. Could it be fair to punish mentally ill or allegedly “uncivilized” people? Could British civilization survive if killers avoided the noose?

Andrew Scull is a big name in the history of medicine, his previous book was reviewed glowingly by Roy Porter There is a growing literature on the history of psychiatry This volume represents an impressively wide range of coverage and will appear to historians and sociologists alike