Empire of Convicts: Indian Penal Labor in Colonial Southeast Asia (California World History Library)

California World History Library

by Anand A. Yang

Empire of Convicts  focuses on male and female Indians incarcerated in Southeast Asia for criminal and political offenses committed in colonial South Asia. From the seventeenth century onward, penal transportation was a key strategy of British imperial rule, exemplified by deportations first to the Americas and later to Australia. Case studies from the insular prisons of Bengkulu, Penang, and Singapore illuminate another carceral regime in the Indian Ocean World that brought South Asia and Southeast Asia together through a global system of forced migration and coerced labor. A major contribution to histories of crime and punishment, prisons, law, labor, transportation, migration, colonialism, and the Indian Ocean World, Empire of Convicts narrates the experiences of Indian bandwars (convicts) and shows how they exercised agency in difficult situations, fashioning their own worlds and even becoming “their own warders.” Anand A. Yang brings long journeys across  kala pani  (black waters) to life in a deeply researched and engrossing account that moves fluidly between local and global contexts. 

292 pages, Hardcover

Published January 19, 2021

Reviews

[Stevie · Rating 4 out of 5]

disclaimer - read this for my grad. class, was not assigned chapter 3 or the epilogue so i did not read those parts.
i enjoyed learning so much information. I had known about the penal colonies in Australia, where British and specifically Irish convicts were sent to, but nothing
about other penal settlements. I appreciated that the author used some of that as a starting point
to make the reader familiar with the concept and then went on to explain how it was organized
differently for convicts from South Asia. I think the structure of the book was well-organized.
The first chapter gave an overview of the system and provided important details, while chapters
two and four gave insight into these penal settlements, by looking in depth at two different
locations at two different times. Comparing the settlements shows how the system changed over
several decades. There were some topics brought up that I wish there had been more information
about, but I understand the information itself may be limited due to the limitations on sources
from the views of the bandwars and those close to them, which is something the book
highlighted at the start.
Would recommend to anyone interested in history of South Asia and/or the british empire and/or penal settlements and/or forced labor.