By Kellie Moss Fremantle Prison, Western Australia (authors own image). The history of convict confinement in Western Australia has been dominated by one towering limestone structure: Fremantle prison. However, convicts were incredibly mobile as they built public works beyond the walls of the prison, and received nominal freedom as probationers and ticket-of-leave holders. […]
My recent appointment as lecturer at the History Department of the Utrecht University has brought me in close contact with the bourgeoning field of International Relations (IR) studies. Inevitably, as I read articles and books on the subject, and design and teach related courses, I am comparing the theoretical and methodological assumptions of IR with […]
In 1884, a Russian woman by the name of Liudmila Volkenshtein was found guilty of anti-tsarist “terrorism” by a military court in St Petersburg. Her crimes were bound up with her membership in an underground group called “The People’s Will” (Narodnaia Volia), an organization that in 1881 had carried out the assassination of Tsar Alexander II. Volkenshtein herself […]
Two weeks ago, a joint workshop on ‘Forced labour, confinement and repression: European, Imperial and Post-Colonial Perspectives’ was hosted by The Carceral Archipelago project and The Stanley Burton Centre for Genocide and Holocaust Studies, both at the University of Leicester. Our aim was to bring into dialogue practices of coercion, confinement and forced labour […]
Preamble: In December, the Carceral Archipelago team – including Clare Anderson, Kellie Moss, Katie Roscoe, Carrie Crockett, Lorainne Paterson, Anna McKay, and Adam Barker – attended the Carceral Geographies Conference at the University of Birmingham. For those interested in further content from the conference, please see this Storify, and full talks and presentation slides are […]
By Miyamoto Takashi Note: This article is reprinted with permission from the author. It originally appeared in The Asia-Pacific Journal. Introduction Figure 1: Entrance of the Miyanohara tunnel, the Miike Coal Mine. [March 1, 2016] The Mitsui Miike Coal Mine, one of several UNESCO registered Meiji Industrial Revolution Sites since 2015 [Fig. 1]. While the […]
In this blog post I review the documentary ‘A Secret History of my Family: Gadbury Sisters’, which aired in 2016, and discuss how it reflects changing attitudes to convict ancestry amongst British and Australian descendants. It is re-blogged from the the wonderful History on the Box in which postgraduate students from the School of History, Politics and IR at the […]
A few years ago, the eminent scholar of the Russian Gulag, Professor Judith Pallot, challenged me to consider the relevance of the sociology of incarceration as a means of understanding convict experiences in penal colonies. She advised me to think in particular about Gresham M. Sykes’ classic 1958 text, The Society of Captives: A […]
In 1871, a group of men – hereditary chiefs of the Six Nations of the Grand River – met with anthropologist Horatio Hale in the town of Brantford, Ontario. The people of the Six Nations community are Haudenosaunee – the People of the Longhouse, a confederacy of nations that predates European contact with Indigenous peoples […]
By Kellie Moss Western Australia welcomed the transportation of convicts in 1850 as a solution to the economic problems which had affected the colony since its foundation as a free settlement in 1829. However, the 1857 Penal Servitude Act significantly altered the kinds of convicts being sent as deportation was discontinued for sentences shorter than […]
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