Convicts: A Global History by Clare Anderson

Abstract

Visitors to the Breton city of Brest can take the téléphérique from the edge of the city center across the Penfeld River to an arts complex housed in the old arsenal buildings high on the opposite bank. This cable car offers an unparalleled view of what was a huge penal-military-industrial complex, a set of docks and quays for the French navy, built largely by the labor of convicts incarcerated in the city’s riverside bagne—one of France’s largest prisons—and its galleys. When the prison was shut in 1858 for being too soft on its inmates, convicts were shipped across the oceans, under a law passed in 1854, to penal colonies in French Guiana and, after 1864, New Caledonia, where they cleared land, farmed, and built more infrastructure for the French empire. As Anderson’s new book demonstrates, the sorts of connections between empire, penal regimes, and labor revealed by convicts’ mobile lives give a different cast to both the history of punishment and global histories of imperial power and knowledge.Convicts is a history of “penal mobility” in two ways (7). First, it offers a comparative account of punishment practices across five centuries in not only all of the Western European empires, but also the newly-independent Latin American states, Russia, China, and Japan. This establishes the geographies (including some very useful maps) and demographics of the movement of convicts in each case, and then uses the similarities and differences between these examples to examine changing practices. This remarkable breadth of vision is achieved through original archival research, primarily on the British and French examples, and by drawing on and synthesizing the fruits of Anderson’s extensive and long-standing collaborative work on different convict labor systems within the European Union–funded “Carceral Archipelago” project (2013–2018).Second, this book contributes to our understanding of global history because penal mobility itself was global. European empires moved convicts (including rebels and political exiles, as well as those convicted of criminal activity) across the world from metropole to colony, from colony to colony (often in surprising ways), and sometimes from colony to metropole. For nation-states, such as Japan, Argentina, or Brazil, that used convict labor within, or more usually at, their borders, convict mobility was shaped by a globally networked discussion on the practice convened in print, government reports, and through penal tours and International Penitentiary Congresses held from 1872 onwards.Anderson’s aim and achievement in writing this volume is significantly to rewrite histories of punishment that have focused on incarceration, immobility, and the prison and, at the same time, to insert convicts into global labor history and the history of migration, from which they have been missing. Each of these are interdisciplinary concerns, and Anderson’s approach is shaped by and contributes to two key cross-disciplinary frameworks that have oriented studies of global history for at least the last thirty years—empire and knowledge. Part I of the book examines in detail how empires and states used convict labor (often alongside or instead of other forms of coerced labor) to secure territories and borderlands, to clear forests and transform other environments, to settle and farm, and to build crucial infrastructure. Part II shows how knowledge of the convict system itself was generated and circulated, but also that convicts were part of the production and circulation of global forms of knowledge about bodies, nature, and society, particularly in the nineteenth century.Convicts were involved in exploration and natural history at the margins of empire, but also in studies that used new techniques of bodily measurement and social science to test theories of medicine, criminality and race, and of changing social structures. While these are histories of power and control, Anderson is constantly alert to the ways in which convicts resisted, subverted, and moved against authority in order to make their own lives where they could and to produce, reproduce, and circulate radical and subversive political ideas.Overall, 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.