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

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, and churches. Yang offers multiple layers to this story, which lasts through the beginning of World War I, from close examinations of the social histories of these building projects as well as larger scaled imperial historical analysis, as he mentions at the onset how “British officials increasingly perceived transportation as a punishment perfectly calibrated to rid the empire of political opponents and dangerous criminals” (p. 38).

Chapter two is centered on Fateh Khan, one of three brothers imprisoned in Bengkulu, who rose to the position of overseer and counter in the treasury office, termed “Khan Sahib” in official reports. Through meticulous readings of fragments of Khan’s life and works from a robbery trial in 1813, Yang pieces together the story of this remarkable bandwar, revealing a slave he owned (“Jenny”) as well as petitions he and others wrote from prison. Chapter three focuses on Penang, a center for political rebels, especially poligar leaders from south India who revolted against Company forces in India. The final substantive chapter examines Singapore from the 1820s through the 1860s, a home of political rebels like the Maharaj and Khurruk Singh, as well as a site of extensive building of roads, bridges, and churches by convicts. In an epilogue, titled “Life after Life: The Afterlives of Bandwars in the Straits Settlements,” Yang reflects on the fleeting presence of memories of convicts and their descendants, including stories of sons of convicts who rose to great heights, like Soma Basapa (1893–1943), known for his wealth, his role in Indian community affairs in Singapore, and his collection of animals in the early twentieth century. As Yang notes, descendants insist his original family name was Singh and that the convict origin story is concocted by enemies of the family. Public displays of convicts, their labors, and their imprints on Singaporean society remain minimal, though brief mention is made in the National Museum of Singapore and more extensive coverage exists in the new India Heritage Center. Yang’s approach demonstrates both the difficulties inherent in tracing, and then analyzing the public life of, this history in Southeast Asia today.

He poses questions from a variety of historical literatures on “unfree labor,” including the large field of trans-Atlantic slavery in conversation with the primary sources and historical narratives emanating out of South Asian and Southeast Asian convict labor histories. Using wholly original source material, Yang also uncovers a range of important issues well known to scholars of these topics, including the unwillingness of contemporary descendants of slavery and/or convict labor to speak openly about such histories, and at times to erase...