A Global History of Convicts and Penal Colonies | Clare Anderson

This expansive edited volume complements a number of recent attempts to bring together a growing body of research on convict labor and penal colonies in a wide variety of empires and post-colonial nation states from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries. Eleven chapters are case studies of different global penal transportation systems. One of the main preoccupations of most of these case-study chapters is to quantify the size and evolution of the convict labor flows to examine their relative importance to imperial and national state building projects. Depending on the sources available and the consequent state of regional historiographies, these chapters offer analyses of available data while pointing the way forward for needed research to fill historiographical gaps. These chapters also examine, to varying degrees, the lives of convict laborers and the roles they played in the development of frontier, colonial, and post-independence nation states. The editor Clare Anderson contributes an introductory assessment chapter that highlights the common and divergent themes in the case-study chapters and their collective interventions in and implications for ongoing debates on the nature of penal transportation and the development of criminal justice practices more generally. Anthropologist Laura Ann Stoler provides some concluding reflections on the volume and the emerging field of migratory convict labor systems and penal colonies. Leia Mais