"The book—a product of decades of research—is especially valuable as a narrative that weaves together the lived experiences of convicts and the larger socio-economic and political order they were coerced to serve."
SOJOURN: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia
"Empire of Convicts is an informative and closely reasoned addition to histories of colonial labour and penology and to the burgeoning literature on the Indian Ocean World."
Journal of Development Studies
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 • Across the Kala Pani: The Global and Local Contexts of Penal Transportation
2 • "Bundwars, Malays, Sebundy Sepoys, and Neas Men": The Bengkulu World of the Khan Brothers, 1797–1825
3 • "Kumpanee ke Noukur": Rajas and Robbers in Penang, 1790–1870s
4 • "Near China beyond the Seas Far Far Distant from Juggernath": Convict Workers and the Making of Colonial Singapore, 1825–1870s
5 • Epilogue—Life after Life: The Afterlives of Bandwars in the Straits Settlements
Notes
Bibliography
Index
"Empire of Convicts makes available to specialist and nonspecialist readers the results of a lifetime's research into crime and criminality in colonial India. Anand A. Yang's deep knowledge of his chosen subject allows him to help readers at all levels grasp the role of new technologies of power in shaping the experience of convicts, who became in a sense 'their own warders.' This exposes the hidden history of colonial culture. Yang shows how when seen from below, colonialism was the result of the continual negotiation of convict identities in which the latter were far from powerless. An essential contribution to the global history of coerced labor."—Edmund Burke III, editor of Struggle and Survival in the Modern Middle East