Empire of Convicts

Indian Penal Labor in Colonial Southeast Asia

Anand A Yang author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:University of California Press

Published:10th Mar '21

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Empire of Convicts cover

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. 

"The book—a product of decades of research—is especially valuable as a narrative that weaves together the lived experiences of convicts and the larger socio-economic and political order they were coerced to serve." * SOJOURN: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia *
"Empire of Convicts is an informative and closely reasoned addition to histories of colonial labour and penology and to the burgeoning literature on the Indian Ocean World." * Journal of Development Studies *

ISBN: 9780520294561

Dimensions: 229mm x 152mm x 25mm

Weight: 544g

292 pages