Felix Ackermann

This project reexamines the history of incarceration as a tool of imperial rule in Central Europe. It asks how, throughout the 19^th century, Russia, Prussia, and the Habsburg Empire incorporated the lands of the Polish Crown and the Lithuanian Grand Duchy and established new prisons as spaces of carceral statehood. By comparing the modernization of incarceration in three different imperial contexts, the project highlights how new penal regimes were established through state coercion, practices that also addressed the necessity to confront and respond to regional, linguistic, and religious differences within the partitioned lands.