Discourses of exclusion and the “convict stain” in the Indian Ocean (c. 1800-1850)

In recent years, the historiography of the British presence in India has grown to include an impressive set of literature on marginal communities, including soldiers, prostitutes, orphans, vagrants, and ‘loafers’. This work has been significant in drawing out some of the social complexities of colonial settlement and expansion, particularly during the era of ‘high imperialism’ at the end of the nineteenth century... This chapter will examine the escape and migration of Australian convicts, ex-convicts, and free settlers during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as a means of extending our understanding of India and the Indian Ocean more broadly as ‘spaces of disorder’ through which colonial discourses of exclusion were constructed. It is also through an exploration of their experiences that aspects of what Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker describe as ‘the many-headed hydra’ of proletarian life, and the open challenge they sometimes posed to British authority, can be discussed in the Indian Ocean context. [Taken from introduction]