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The British Indian Empire, 1789-1939

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posted on 2018-10-25, 08:47 authored by Clare Anderson
[First paragraph] Between 1789 and 1939 the British transported at least 108,000 Indian, Burmese, Malay and Chinese convicts to penal settlements around the Bay of Bengal and Indian Ocean, and to prisons in the south and west of mainland India. The large majority of these convicts were men; and most had been convicted of serious crimes, including murder, gang robbery, rebellion and violent offences against property. In each location, convicts constituted a highly mobile workforce that was vital to British imperial ambitions. The British exploited their labour in land clearance, infrastructural development, mining, agriculture and cultivation. They also used them to establish villages and to settle land. Asian convicts responded to their transportation in remarkable ways. They resisted their forced removal from home, led violent uprisings and refused to work. They struck up social and economic relationships with each other, and with people outside the penal settlements. They joined cosmopolitan communities or helped to forge new syncretic societies. If ‘creolization’ and ‘coolitude’ capture conceptually the interactions and culture and identity outcomes of enslaved and indentured people in the Indian Ocean world, ‘convitude’ might do the same work for the experiences of transported Asian convicts.

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Citation

Anderson, C, The British Indian Empire, 1789-1939, 'A Global History of Convicts and Penal Colonies', Bloomsbury Academic, 2018

Author affiliation

/Organisation/COLLEGE OF SOCIAL SCIENCES, ARTS AND HUMANITIES/School of History, Politics and International Relations

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Published in

Anderson

Publisher

Bloomsbury Academic

isbn

9781350000674;9781350000698;9781350000681

Copyright date

2018

Available date

2019-05-17

Publisher version

https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/a-global-history-of-convicts-and-penal-colonies-9781350000674/

Notes

The file associated with this record is under embargo until 18 months after publication, in accordance with the publisher's self-archiving policy. The full text may be available through the publisher links provided above.

Language

en

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