Convicts
A Global History

A new global history perspective on the relationship between convict mobility and governance, nation building, imperial expansion, and knowledge formation.

Clare Anderson (Author)

9781108840729, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 13 January 2022

400 pages
23.5 x 15.7 x 3.2 cm, 0.858 kg

'Convicts: A Global History is a remarkable achievement, a work of global history based on many years of research that restores a subaltern group to its place in the world through both a panoramic overview and the tracing of individual lives lived in extremis.' Miles Ogborn, Journal of Interdisciplinary History

Clare Anderson provides a radical new reading of histories of empire and nation, showing that the history of punishment is not connected solely to the emergence of prisons and penitentiaries, but to histories of governance, occupation, and global connections across the world. Exploring punitive mobility to islands, colonies, and remote inland and border regions over a period of five centuries, she proposes a close and enduring connection between punishment, governance, repression, and nation and empire building, and reveals how states, imperial powers, and trading companies used convicts to satisfy various geo-political and social ambitions. Punitive mobility became intertwined with other forms of labour bondage, including enslavement, with convicts a key source of unfree labour that could be used to occupy territories. Far from passive subjects, however, convicts manifested their agency in various forms, including the extension of political ideology and cultural transfer, and vital contributions to contemporary knowledge production.

1. Introduction: a British expedition to the Brazilian penal colony of Fernando de Noronha in 1887. Part I: 2. Empires and colonies
3. Nations, borders, and islands
4. Enslavement, banishment, and penal transportation
5. Imperial governance
6. Insurgency, politics, and religion
Part II: 7. Punishment and penal systems
8. Encounters, exploration, and knowledge
9. Medicine, criminality, and race
10. The human sciences
11. Escape and extradition
12. Conclusion
Index.

Subject Areas: Sentencing & punishment [LNFX1], Penology & punishment [JKVP], Ethical issues: capital punishment [JFMC], General & world history [HBG]