This work offers a new interpretation of Australia's convict past. It is based on a detailed analysis of records of 20,000 male and female convicts - one in three of those transported to New South Wales between 1817 and 1840.

New South Wales government administration increased four-fold during the first six decades of the twentieth century and, with the growth in population came increasing community expectations. This tells how the Public Service Board became responsible for employing staff for this burgeoning administrative corps.

The workings of the convict system and how a penal colony changed into a free society.

Clare Anderson provides a radical new reading of histories of empire and nation, showing that the history of punishment is not connected solely to the emergence of prisons and penitentiaries, but to histories of governance, occupation, and global connections across the world. Exploring punitive mobility to islands, colonies, and remote inland and border regions over a period of five centuries, she proposes a close and enduring connection between punishment, governance, repression, and nation and empire building, and reveals how states, imperial powers, and trading companies used convicts to satisfy various geo-political and social ambitions. Punitive mobility became intertwined with other forms of labour bondage, including enslavement, with convicts a key source of unfree labour that could be used to occupy territories. Far from passive subjects, however, convicts manifested their agency in various forms, including the extension of political ideology and cultural transfer, and vital contributions to contemporary knowledge production.

This is a book on how and why workers come together. Almost coincident with its inception, worker organisation is a central and enduring element of capitalism. In the 19th and 20th centuries’ mobilisation by workers played a substantial role in reshaping critical elements of these societies in Europe, North America, Australasia and elsewhere including the introduction of minimum labour standards (living wage rates, maximum hours etc), workplace safety and compensation laws and the rise of welfare state more generally. Notwithstanding setbacks in recent decades, worker organisation represents a pivotal countervailing force to moderate the excesses of capitalism and is likely to become even more influential as the social consequences of rising global inequality become more manifest. Indeed, instability and periodic shifts in the respective influence of capital and labour are endemic to capitalism. As formal institutions have declined in some countries or unions outlawed and severely repressed in others, there has been growing recognition of informal strike activity by workers and wider alliances between unions and community organisations in others. While such developments are seen as new they aren’t. Indeed, understanding of worker organisation is often ahistorical and even those understandings informed by historical research are, this book will argue, in need of revision. This book provides a new perspective on and new insights into how and why workers organise, and what shapes this organisation. The Origins of Worker Mobilisation will be key reading for scholars, academics and policy makers the fields of industrial relations, HRM, labour economics, labour history and related disciplines.

Empire of Convicts focuses on male and female Indians incarcerated in Southeast Asia for criminal and political offenses committed in colonial South Asia. From the seventeenth century onward, penal transportation was a key strategy of British imperial rule, exemplified by deportations first to the Americas and later to Australia. Case studies from the insular prisons of Bengkulu, Penang, and Singapore illuminate another carceral regime in the Indian Ocean World that brought South Asia and Southeast Asia together through a global system of forced migration and coerced labor. A major contribution to histories of crime and punishment, prisons, law, labor, transportation, migration, colonialism, and the Indian Ocean World, Empire of Convicts narrates the experiences of Indian bandwars (convicts) and shows how they exercised agency in difficult situations, fashioning their own worlds and even becoming “their own warders.” Anand A. Yang brings long journeys across kala pani (black waters) to life in a deeply researched and engrossing account that moves fluidly between local and global contexts.

The proclamation by the United Nations General Assembly of the International Year to Commemorate the Struggle against Slavery and its Abolition during 2004 marked the culmination of recent efforts to re-engage with slavery’s past and create an intellectual, social, political and ethical climate conducive to a sustained and meaningful dialogue among cultures and civilisations. The past decade witnessed an upsurge of national and international exhibitions and conferences on the impact of slavery and the overwhelming and enduring cultural miscegenation and the demographic, socio-political and spiritual hybridisation that the phenomenon consciously or unconsciously initiated; the celebration of efforts by Abolitionists to publicise the savagery of this inhumane practice; a revival of interest in and the glorification of, the often ignored or historically negatively represented resistance to slavery by slaves themselves; and, numerous endeavours to address the negative legacies of slavery like racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance, which continue to impinge upon our present as part of contemporary politics. Yet, these ventures aimed at raising awareness of the horrors of slave trade and slavery, at honouring struggles for the emancipation of the enslaved, at examining the aftermath of slavery like the emergence of a new historic consciousness, at restoring broken links and solidarity between the historically dislocated diasporas and their countries of origin, at commemorating sites of memory, and, at celebrating artistic and cultural métissage, such as the UNESCO’s Slave Route Project, have largely focused on the Atlantic World, and the deportation of slaves from Africa to other parts of the World, raising questions about the legacy of slavery in other societies, like those in Asia, the Pacific and Europe, where slavery still remains on the margins of national and post-colonial histories. This edited volume is an attempt to reconsider slavery as a global human institution which has coexisted with other socio-political, economic, legal and cultural institutions. As a temporally and spatially ubiquitous phenomenon, it has generated and continues to, engender legacies, be they historical, oral or visual, which need to be compared and discussed to facilitate dialogue between cultures and civilisations and to mitigate the wounds of the past which continue to scar our present. It brings together writings by scholars from history, literature, anthropology and cultural studies who examine the indelible mark left by slavery in its various forms, on societies, cultures and peoples all over the world and attempts by artistes and writers to alleviate this stigmata of History. This volume consists of two sections. The first section entitled "Connecting Histories" explores some of the varied forms in which slavery presented itself in the last four centuries and the need to reengage with its legacies. Adhering to Manning’s contention that slavery is "an enduring metaphor for inequities in the treatment of humans", this section focuses on identifying the legacy of slavery and its significance in scholarship (Manning); alternate perspectives on slavery through the examination of forced labour and the dehumanising treatment of indigenous people in Australia (Read), enforced migration and labour exploitation of convicts in penal colonies (Maxwell-Stewart); and, a historical overview of Lusitanian slavery in India (D’Souza) and the hybridisation of pre-colonial slavery traditions in the perpetuation of the perkerniersstelse, or a profitably managed European settler-colony based on the global monopoly of nutmeg production, by the Dutch (Winn). The second section of the book entitled "Centering Discourses: Identity, Image and Text" begins with a postcolonialist reading of Caribbean slavery as a legacy of capitalism, imperialism and plantation culture and above all, the globalization of sugar consumption (Ashcroft). The two chapters that follow resuscitate two of the many categories of slaves who were victims of historical silence, namely children in the sugar plantations of the West Indies (Teelucksingh) and Martiniquan maroons (Fernandes-Dias). Articulating with the discourse on identity and cultural appropriation introduced in the preceding essay, chapter nine provides an overview of the power struggle at work in the construction of Creole identity and its political legitimization, through a topical analysis of the process of commemoration of a "site of memory", Le Morne Brabant, symbol of slavery and marronage in the Mauritian collective memory (Carmignani). The final two chapters explore the problematics of presenting slavery through the adoption of a counter-hegemonic discourse, particularly through the arts. Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko which exalts the Black slave as a hero without making any explicit case for the abolition of slavery, continues to occupy the terrain of sympathist - abolitionist ambiguity (Landford) while the Amistad case, despite its numerous positive legacies, demonstrates how excessive popularization of the incident as an Abolitionist cause célèbre, resulted in an overload of historical memory to the point of obscuring historical reality (Fernandes Dias). Despite the volume's overarching desire to provide a global and comparative overview of the historical, ideological, economical and cultural factors that contributed to the evolution of slavery and the legacies that the institution generated, this volume is limited in the thematic, chronological and geographic terrain that it has covered. We attribute this shortcoming to the complexity of slavery itself as an institution, the problematic of defining what constitutes slavery and the historical silence maintained over its dehumanizing effects. Yet the story of slavery is also a tale of survival, of resistance and of the resilience of the human spirit to transcend oppression and preserve its inherent dignity. It is the celebration of the rich cultural fusion and métissage that rose from the ashes of human suffering. The wounds of the past need to be healed, perhaps initially, at a mythopoetic level, through the articulation of repressed collective angst and its legacies through the arts and through scholarship.