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"This impressive book combines a compelling reconstruction of convict lives with sophisticated historical analysis of the British Indian colonial transportation regime in Southeast Asia. Meticulously researched, this is social history at its best."--David Gilmartin, author of Blood and Water: The Indus River Basin in Modern History
"Empire of Convicts makes available to specialist and nonspecialist readers the results of a lifetime's research into crime and criminality in colonial India. Anand A. Yang's deep knowledge of his chosen subject allows him to help readers at all levels grasp the role of new technologies of power in shaping the experience of convicts, who became in a sense 'their own warders.' This exposes the hidden history of colonial culture. Yang shows how when seen from below, colonialism was the result of the continual negotiation of convict identities in which the latter were far from powerless. An essential contribution to the global history of coerced labor."—Edmund Burke III, editor of Struggle and Survival in the Modern Middle East
List of contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 • Across the Kala Pani: The Global and Local Contexts of Penal Transportation
2 • "Bundwars, Malays, Sebundy Sepoys, and Neas Men": The Bengkulu World of the Khan Brothers, 1797–1825
3 • "Kumpanee ke Noukur": Rajas and Robbers in Penang, 1790–1870s
4 • "Near China beyond the Seas Far Far Distant from Juggernath": Convict Workers and the Making of Colonial Singapore, 1825–1870s
5 • Epilogue—Life after Life: The Afterlives of Bandwars in the Straits Settlements
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Anand A. Yang is the Walker Family Endowed Professor in History at the University of Washington and the author of The Limited Raj and Bazaar India.
Summary
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.
