Convicts: A Global History, by Clare Anderson

This is a rich and important book that provides a fitting culmination to decades of research, much of it led by Clare Anderson herself, on the global history of convicts. As Anderson explains here, her fascination with the world created by convicts began with her Ph.D. It has continued, piece by piece, to include studies of why convicts matter to global understanding of the histories of forced labour, forced emigration, race, crime and punishment, colonialism and imperialism, medical practice and knowledge, and histories of resistance, resilience and rebellion. Now we have Anderson’s mature thoughts on the phenomenon of global convict labour flows in the modern world.

Convicts has two complementary parts: the first provides a pithy guide to the uses of convict mobility by empires from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries; the second is a thematic adventure. For those who are familiar only with the well-known histories of convict transportation in the British and possibly the French empires, there is much to discover in both parts. The survey covers convict flows in European empires, independent Latin American nations, Russia, China and Japan, which are interlaced into a dense chronological weave. What is possibly the most illuminating feature of these chapters is what they reveal about the common patterns in the use of convicts, despite varieties of governmentality. This included the broaching of new frontiers, the isolation and immobilisation of political and religious rebels, the pacification of Indigenous people and the securing and planting of settler colonies.

While Anderson is always rigorous in respecting and validating the evidence, she consistently foregrounds the agency of convict populations and individuals. In case after case, her convicts defy the pervasive myths which assume them to be undifferentiated victims, or rebels in waiting. Instead, there is complexity and occasional defiance, mitigated by circumstance. Liberal states are confronted with the reality of past oppression. Religious rebels, for example, were transported by both the Netherlands VOC and Denmark-Norway, and lend surprising notes to sea-based rebellions. Following the mutiny on the Bombay Presidency ship Recovery, half the convict mutineers swore a rebellious oath on the Qur’an. The British incarcerated Irish, Indian and other political prisoners in a global archipelago where they metamorphosed, in myth and sometimes in reality, into pioneers, nation builders and archetypes. Anderson sparks the traditional narrative of exile and rebellion by using the memoirs, not of Irish transportees to Britain’s Australian gulag, but those of Indian nationalists such as V.D. Savarkar, sentenced to two life terms in the Andamans in 1911.

The thematic chapters include extensive original research in archives. This part of the book begins with the International Penitentiary Congress of 1872, and provides a magisterial contribution to the understanding of theories of punishment and rehabilitation, from Alexander Maconochie and Walter Crofton on Norfolk Island and Ireland, to the interventions of Germany and Russia up to the First World War. Subsequent chapters cover, in turn, the encounter between convicts and indigenous people, the use of convicts as an experimental body for the advance of understanding of medicine, criminality and race, as well as for knowledge of the human sciences, and social science research methods.

A final chapter continues the commitment of the whole book to foregrounding convict agency, by addressing the subject of escape within and across national and imperial borders. There is some bravura forensic archival research here. There is, for example, the case of the Especulación, a Spanish convict ship sailing from Havana to Cádiz, which was shipwrecked in January 1836 off the coast of Britain’s Grand Bahama island. Anderson traces the escapees’ astonishing journey across borders, islands and jurisdictions. She notes that convicts were able to manipulate the effective absence of extradition agreements, which allowed many to remain on the run legally. The sequence of historic escapes she goes on to analyse are thrilling as escape narratives, and more surprising than fiction. She reveals that escaped and shipwrecked convicts formed alliances with Indigenous people, sought and created havens for political prisoners, and became a potent source of embarrassment for empires and nations at war. Anderson demonstrates that convict escape forms part of the larger narrative of insurgency in the age of revolution. At the same time, the threat of convict escape from colonial outposts fed fears of global criminality which ultimately contributed to the anti-transportation movement.

Anderson is generous with her predecessors in the field, even as she continues to build on and move beyond them. Her conclusion, bibliography and guide to archives are essential references for historians who will dare to follow her. For its grand vision, empathy and insight into convicts themselves, intellectual originality and summative authority, this book is a triumph.