The ‘peculiar institution’ is a term associated with the history of slavery, but sociologist David Garland adopted the term to describe America’s death penalty in “an age of abolition.” Historians of the death penalty’s abolition have tied it to the upsurge in human rights from the mid-twentieth century and to anti-colonial independence movements. Yet, these two dominant approaches have stymied the death penalty’s historiography because they flatten out the multiple and contradictory histories of penal law beyond U.S. borders. This panel provides a comparative approach to highlight the significance of colonization, anti-colonialism and nationalism in the twentieth century’s ages of abolition. Andrew Novak, a mid-career criminal law expert in the transnational history of capital punishment and clemency, challenges the dominant framework of imperial death penalty historiography by showing how a colonial governor of the Philippines introduced de-facto abolition through executive clemency; however, the first nationalist president elected carried the policy forward until the Japanese invasion. Far from an imperial imposition, abolition in the mid-twentieth century aligned with nationalism. In Barbados, the former British colony in which the death penalty propped up a racist and exploitative regime, abolition did not accompany independence in 1966. As early-career historical criminologist Lynsey Black shows, Privy Council rulings on the death penalty in the Commonwealth Caribbean had sought to chip away at this punishment where possible, something which provoked an anti-colonial backlash and elevated the death penalty as an issue of sovereignty. When the Caribbean Court of Justice ultimately struck down Barbados’ mandatory death penalty, ironically doing what the Privy Council felt they could not, it was its positioning as a Caribbean court which emboldened its decision. Nationalism as a fount for retentionism also coloured Canadian abolitionist debates in the mid-twentieth century. Historian Carolyn Strange argues that the ‘lawlessness’ of the U.S. and the states’ reckless experimentation with methods other than hanging reinforced the need to retain Canada’s death penalty. Through a discourse of nationalism, capital punishment was constructed as a bulwark against vigilante justice, including lynching, and the backbone of law and order. The legacy of these imperial, colonial, and national histories of abolitionist politics lingers in the twenty-first century. In the Philippines, subject to centuries of colonization, de jure abolition has been in place since 2006. However during President Duterte’s term, abolition in association with human rights was repudiated as yet-another imperialistic interference in Philippine affairs. The Barbadian government reacted to the Caribbean Court’s ruling by introducing the death penalty as punishment for certain heinous murders only, making the criminal law cohere with self-government. And in Canada, waves of reinstatement support since the death penalty’s abolition in 1976 have taken the form of penal envy toward U.S. states that maintain the death penalty and carry it out. This comparative transdisciplinary panel makes the case for further research on the ‘ages’ of abolition to adjust the focus from the peculiarities of the death penalty in the U.S. and the teleological narrative of human rights in order to expose more commonalities than current historiography recognizes.