Capital Punishment in Palestine during the British Mandate This paper examines capital punishment in Palestine during the British Mandate (1920-1948) and focuses on the transition from the judiciary to the chief executive authority, particularly examining the diverse factors that influenced the High Commissioner's decision regarding the confirmation or commutation of death sentences. We utilize a comprehensive dataset of more than 850 capital cases constructed from archival documents and contemporary newspapers. In total, we identified 289 death sentences: 129 were commuted to imprisonment sentences, while 160 were confirmed by the High Commissioner and subsequently carried out. Our analysis uncovers significant disparities in sentencing outcomes based on motives, gender, and ethnicity, offering insights into the intricate dynamics of capital punishment during this historical period. Capital punishment, a tool of colonial power that endures to this day, failed to reduce crime and, in historical perspective, evidences the way in which structures of power and domination worked in and through Ottoman and then British forms of imperialism. The uneven rationales behind commutation point to Britain’s use of ethnicity and gender as mitigating factors in determining punishment. Social control, protection of property, and potential anti-state actions captivated the British judicial system and acted as justifications for execution. Culture, understood through an orientalist gaze, acted as a mitigating variable that further constructed Arabs as savage, tribal, beyond the assimilative project of state-building. Attorney General, Norman Bentwich’s description of Arabs as “Illiterate, primitive” and as a group whose “anger turns quickly to a savage desire to kill,” (Bentwich 1934) show the way in which British imaginings of “the Arab” influenced criminal proceedings at all stages in ways that further rendered Arabs vulnerable to violent crime and mobilized cultural explanations that hardened underlying racism. In addition to exploring the tactics of colonial power and control, our study also illustrates how to address archival silences. Our use of primary sources as a basis for constructing data sets weaponizes colonial recordkeeping as a form of critique. Future research can build on this energy by conceiving of the archive as a social construct that can be actively built by all. To this end, collective efforts can be a necessary intervention in colonial structures of knowledge. References Bentwich, Norman. 1934. “The Palestine Criminal Code.” Howard Journal 4, no. 1:61.