"This impressive book combines a compelling reconstruction of convict lives with sophisticated historical analysis of the British Indian colonial transportation regime in Southeast Asia. Meticulously researched, this is social history at its best."--David Gilmartin, author of Blood and Water: The Indus River Basin in Modern History
"Empire of Convicts makes available to specialist and nonspecialist readers the results of a lifetime's research into crime and criminality in colonial India. Anand A. Yang's deep knowledge of his chosen subject allows him to help readers at all levels grasp the role of new technologies of power in shaping the experience of convicts, who became in a sense 'their own warders.' This exposes the hidden history of colonial culture. Yang shows how when seen from below, colonialism was the result of the continual negotiation of convict identities in which the latter were far from powerless. An essential contribution to the global history of coerced labor."-Edmund Burke III, editor of Struggle and Survival in the Modern Middle East
