‘My only weapon being a pencil’: Inscribing the prison in the New Hebrides

Abstract

The process of producing British prisons and prisoners in the colonial New Hebrides is the subject of this paper. Under the Anglo‐French Condominium, British and French police forces theoretically were divisions of a single armed constabulary; yet each operated separately in practice. Prison labour became essential to a spatial order that the British feared they could not otherwise achieve. The paper begins with the account of a colonial officer, armed with only a pencil, arresting a murderer in 1907. It then examines an archival debate about allowing some prisoners to live in grass houses, and ends with analysis of interviews with retired colonial officers, their wives and children about attitudes toward prisoners. The conclusion is that islanders, for their own reasons, were complicit with the British project of creating stereotypically ‘docile axe murderers'; the British, therefore, were right to be concerned about what the natives thought and, occasionally, to be afraid.