Empire of Convicts: Indian Penal Labor in Colonial Southeast Asia

SYNOPSIS

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. The talk will highlight the experiences of Indian convicts and shows how they exercised agency in difficult situations, fashioning their own worlds and even becoming “their own warders.”

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Anand A. Yang, Walker Endowed Professor of History and International Studies, University of Washington, Seattle, is the former chair of the History Department (2015-19) and former Director of the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies (2002-10).

He is the author of several books, including The Limited Raj: Agrarian Relations in Colonial India and Bazaar India: Peasants, Traders, Markets and the Colonial State, and in 2021, Empire of Convicts: Indian Penal Labor in Colonial Southeast Asia and in 2017, Thirteen Months in China, a book that he edited and co-translated.

A former editor of The Journal of Asian Studies and Peasant Studies, Yang served as the president of the Association for Asian Studies in 2006-7 and the president of the World History Association in 2008-10.

REGISTRATION

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