Abstract
AbstractThe essays in this volume provide a new perspective on the history of convicts and penal colonies. They demonstrate that the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were a critical period in the reconfiguration of empires, imperial governmentality, and punishment, including through extensive punitive relocation and associated extractive labour. Ranging across the global contexts of Africa, Asia, Australasia, Japan, the Americas, the Pacific, Russia, and Europe, and exploring issues of criminalization, political repression, and convict management alongside those of race, gender, space, and circulation, this collection offers a perspective from the colonies that radically transforms accepted narratives of the history of empire and the history of punishment. In this introduction, we argue that a colony-centred perspective reveals that, during a critical period in world history, convicts and penal colonies created new spatial hierarchies, enabled the incorporation of territories into spheres of imperial influence, and forged new connections and distinctions between “metropoles” and “colonies”. Convicts and penal colonies enabled the formation of expansive and networked global configurations and processes, a factor hitherto unappreciated in the literature.
Highlights
Deportation, and exile have played a crucial role in the history of nations and empires
We focus on the modern period because more global powers employed penal transportation during the third quarter of the nineteenth century than at any other point in world history
The perspective from the colonies reveals a new picture of empire- and nation-building in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and of the ambivalence of subaltern engagement with and resistance to them
Summary
Deportation, and exile have played a crucial role in the history of nations and empires. The richness and diversity of the literature on convict transportation means that we are at the stage at which we can meaningfully discuss more than their significance for the history of migration and punishment – that is to say, the connectivity and interdependence between the evolution of punitive regimes, colonial labour mobility, and empire- and nation-building.[10] This special issue comprises a set of essays on practices of administrative and penal relocations in the British, Dutch, French, Japanese, Russian, Portuguese, Spanish, US, and Italian empires during the period from the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. Several contributions highlight the increasing impact during the period under consideration of administrative and military relocations connected to states of exception, and the “politicization” of punishment and imperial governance it implied.[13]
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