Convicts

'This book is a truly global history of convicts that foregrounds the subaltern subjects who made the modern world. From contributing to scientific knowledge clearing land, building infrastructure, and expanding the territorial ambitions of faraway empires, this book shows how unfree labourers became a prominent feature of a modern global regime after the abolition of slavery. Rigorously researched and intellectually capacious, the book is a must-read for global historians.' Durba Ghosh, author of Gentlemanly Terrorists: Political Violence and the Colonial State in India, 1919–1947 'This astonishing book defines the term magnum opus. With this superb global history from below, based on over twenty-five years of research, Clare Anderson has changed our understanding of world history. From the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries, convict transportation and labour sustained empires and nations, economies and knowledge systems.' Angela Woollacott, author of Settler Society in the Australian Colonies: Self-Government and Imperial Culture 'This is an expansive yet fine-grained exploration of the national, regional and global history of punitive mobility. Weaving together a complex array of cases and conditions, Anderson engages the reader in an analysis of a system that not only affected the lives and fates of millions of people, but has shaped ways of thinking about and organising the world that endure into the present.' Briony Neilson, Australian Book Review 'An impressively informative work of original and meticulously presented scholarship, Convicts: A Global History is a seminal work that is an exceptional and unreservedly recommended addition to community, college, and university library Criminology and Penology History collections.' James A. Cox, Midwest Book Review