Empire of Convicts: Indian Penal Labor in Colonial Southeast Asia by Anand Yang (review)

Abstract

Anand Yang’s Empire of Convicts explores the history of Indian convict laborers in modern Southeast Asia from the late eighteenth century through the rise of World War I. Featuring a vast array of primary sources and historiographic reflections across several subfields, the work focuses on prominent locations in Southeast Asia, such as Penang and Singapore, in the context of convict labor and the migration of convicts from various places in India to the edges of Southeast Asia. Given the integration of sources from South and Southeast Asian archives as well as sources in a range of languages, the work represents a connected world history approach to the study of convict laborers that traverses territorial boundaries of South and Southeast Asia. Yang’s introduction offers a range of histories into which this work fits, from issues of slavery and forced labor, to indenture, to the relatively understudied topic of convict laborers, in South and Southeast Asia. He claims convict laborers, or bandwars, to comprise a comparable site from which to study unfree labor, such as “indentured labor, share cropping, and debt peonage” (p. 31). Primarily because of the expansion of the British Empire in the 1790s, bandwars were sent to Bengkulu, Penang, and Singapore and the building of roads, bridges,