Convicts

Reviewed by: Convicts: A Global History by Clare Anderson Hamish Maxwell-Stewart Convicts: A Global History. By Clare Anderson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Convicts: A Global History is a huge temporal and geographical undertaking. A hundred and thirty individual penal destinations scattered across nineteen different polities are covered in the pages of this remarkable book. While the weight lies with the Western Empires, non-European utilisation of convicted labour is also discussed. This is especially true of Qing China and Tokugawa and Meiji Japan. Yet, it is not just geography, or chronological sweep (the book covers five centuries of penal practice), that gives Convicts scale. In an age where much historical writing has retreated into a series of self-contained sub-disciplines, Anderson fashions her narrative out of a swathe of cultural, economic and social thematic detail. The end result is a masterful account of "punitive mobility." As this latter phrase indicates, she stakes out her territory with some care. There is a technical distinction between exile and penal migration. While both involve forced removal, those sent into exile were not forced to work—or at least not in theory. In practice, however, differences in status that carried meaning in one jurisdiction often proved meaningless post-disembarkation in another. Thus, political elites exiled by the Dutch East Indian Company to Robben Island were forced to cut blubber from seals alongside common criminals. Other boundaries were blurred in practice. Slaves, indentured labourers, prisoners of war and soldiers could be converted into convicts as a result of legal or quasi-legal practices. Penal transportation was particularly favoured as a punishment for slaves, for example, as sale of the condemned provided a convenient means of compensating owners. Vagrants, sex workers and the inhabitants of workhouses were also routinely swept into penal transportation systems—acts that were certainly punitive, although not technically penal. Such slippage makes it difficult to quantify the extent to which criminal justice systems were used to commodify labour to supply colonial demand. As Anderson makes clear, however, even by conservative estimates they must number over a million. Far from constituting an esoteric footnote, she convincingly argues that punitive mobility formed a crucial cog in the machinery of colonialism. That cog meshed with the gears of other systems of labour exploitation. The number of convicts transported by the Portuguese increased after the abolition of slavery in 1869, for example. As Convicts: A Global History makes clear—courts could mint cheap, expendable colonial labour, increasing and reducing supply as demand dictated. That supply was not necessarily measured in bodies. A sentence commodified labour for a set number of years—the longer the term the greater the potential for labour exploitation. As courts were ubiquitous across the colonial world, the web of transportation flows was complex. These did not just link metropolitan places of conviction with sites of colonial labour exploitation. Many of those transported in the Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish, French and British systems were moved from one colonial theatre to another. By contrast, Scandinavian courts only despatched convicts from metropole to the colonies, while the Dutch East India Company exclusively used penal transportation to relocate convicts between colonies. Most transportation systems formed webs, linking multiple sites of conviction with different end destinations. Some systems developed hierarchies reserving particular sites for secondary offenders or colonial subjects. As Anderson covers in some detail, these complex carceral archipelagos provided a particularly convenient means of dealing with political opponents. One of the many strengths of the book is its constant switch of perspective, focussing alternately on the imposition of power from above and its contestation from below. Penal transportation was an effective agent of dispossession across a swathe of imperial domains. It is a particular irony that the dispossessed were vulnerable to transportation themselves. The suppression of resistance could create new transportation flows in other ways too. The Andaman Islands were reopened as a penal destination in the wake of the 1857 revolt against British rule in India. Similarly, Satsuma rebels were amongst the first transported by Meiji Japan to Hokkaido. Across all transportation systems both political and criminal prisoners challenged the conditions that held them in bondage. As in Australia, resistance was targeted. Water

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