Through studies of beheaded Irish traitors, smugglers hung in chains on the English coast, suicides subjected to the surgeon's knife in Dresden and the burial of executed Nazi war criminals, this volume provides a fresh perspective on the history of capital punishment.

Foreword; Pieter Spierenburg Introduction: A Global History of Execution and the Criminal Corpse; Richard Ward: This chapter is available open access under a CC BY license via palgraveconnect.com. 1. Punishing the Dead: Execution and the Executed Body in Eighteenth-Century Ireland; James Kelly 2. 'For the Benefit of Example': Crime-Scene Executions in England, 1720-1830; Steve Poole 3. The Gibbet in the Landscape: Locating the Criminal Corpse in Mid-Eighteenth-Century England; Zoe Dyndor: This chapter is available open access under a CC BY license via palgraveconnect.com. 4. Never Equal before Death: Three Experiences of Dying as seen through Eighteenth-Century French Executions; Pascal Bastien 5. The Ill-Treated Body: Punishing and Utilizing the Early Modern Suicide Corpse; Alexander Kastner and Evelyne Luef 6. Execution and its Aftermath in the Nineteenth-Century British Empire; Clare Anderson 7. Strangled by the Chinese and Kept 'Alive' by the British: Two Infamous Executions and the Discourse of Chinese Legal Despotism; Song-Chuan Chen 8. Dismembering and Remembering the Body: Execution and Post-Execution Display in Africa, c.1870-2000; Stacey Hynd 9. Burying the Past? The Post-Execution History of Nazi War Criminals; Caroline Sharples

The chapters 'Introduction: A Global History of Execution and the Criminal Corpse' and 'The Gibbet in the Landscape: Locating the Criminal Corpse in Mid-Eighteenth-Century England' are open access under a CC BY 4.0 license.

“A Global History of Execution and the Criminal Corpse is a fascinating set of essays that explore not only the socio-political contexts of the death penalty, but also the fate of the condemned after their deaths. … It will be of interest to scholars of the criminal law, punishment, state-society relations, and the cultural history of death and the body.” (Michael Meranze, Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books, clcjbooks.rutgers.edu, January, 2017)