Convicts, Commodities, and Connections in British Asia and the Indian Ocean, 1789–1866

Clare Anderson

doi:10.1017/s0020859019000129

Abstract

AbstractThis article explores the transportation of Indian convicts to the port cities of the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean during the period 1789 to 1866. It considers the relationship between East India Company transportation and earlier and concurrent British Crown transportation to the Americas and Australia. It is concerned in particular with the interconnection between convictism and enslavement in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds. Examining the roots of transportation in South Asia in the repressive policies of the East India Company, especially in relation to its occupation of land and expropriation of resources, it moves on to discuss aspects of convicts’ lives in Moulmein, Singapore, Mauritius, and Aden. This includes their labour regime and their relationship to other workers. It argues that Indian convict transportation was part of a carceral circuit of repression and coerced labour extraction that was intertwined with the expansion of East India Company governance and trade. The Company used transportation as a means of removing resistant subjects from their homes, and of supplying an unfree labour force to develop commodity exports and to build the infrastructure necessary for the establishment, population, and connection of littoral nodes. However, the close confinement and association of convicts during transportation rendered the punishment a vector for the development of transregional political solidarities, centred in and around the Company's port cities.

Highlights

On August, in Moulmein, the capital of British Burma, a gang of one hundred Indian convicts was engaged in its routine monthly task of loading coal onto the East India Company’s paddle steamer HC Tenasserim, at the docks of Mopoon
Examining the roots of transportation in South Asia in the repressive policies of the East India Company, especially in relation to its occupation of land and expropriation of resources, it moves on to discuss aspects of convicts’ lives in Moulmein, Singapore, Mauritius, and Aden. This includes their labour regime and their relationship to other workers. It argues that Indian convict transportation was part of a carceral circuit of repression and coerced labour extraction that was intertwined with the expansion of East India Company governance and trade
This article will explore the origins of Indian penal transportation in the context of earlier and concurrent metropolitan practice in Britain’s Atlantic world and Australian colonies, the interconnection between convictism and enslavement, and the repressive policies enacted by the East India Company in response to subaltern resistance to its expropriation of land and other resources in the Indian subcontinent

Summary

INTRODUCTION

On August , in Moulmein, the capital of British Burma, a gang of one hundred Indian convicts was engaged in its routine monthly task of loading coal onto the East India Company’s paddle steamer HC Tenasserim, at the docks of Mopoon. This article will explore the origins of Indian penal transportation in the context of earlier and concurrent metropolitan practice in Britain’s Atlantic world and Australian colonies, the interconnection between convictism and enslavement, and the repressive policies enacted by the East India Company in response to subaltern resistance to its expropriation of land and other resources in the Indian subcontinent It will trace convict journeys across the Bay of Bengal, and further afield in the Indian Ocean, and discuss aspects of convicts’ lives in penal locations, notably the labour that they performed in port cities and their relationships with other workers. It is widely recognized that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, port cities in the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean were places of cosmopolitan interaction, the economic and social meeting places of Asian sojourners and settlers, in which both friction could arise and syncretic cultural and political solidarities could form

What is perhaps less appreciated is the extent and importance of

No of convicts

REPRESSION AND REBELLION

CONCLUSION