Upriver to Mazaruni Prison (Guyana)
One of the wonderful things about ‘blue skies’ research is the element of surprise that it can throw up. When I began work on ‘The Carceral Archipelago’ project, I had not planned to work on the British Caribbean. I had long been aware of early-modern British and Irish convict flows to islands like Barbados, […]
The “Pains of Imprisonment”: an historical sociology of penal transportation?
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 […]
A Snapshot of Collaborative Work in History
During my PhD study and for the first ten years of my academic career, I researched alone. I went to the archives, I discussed and presented my work to academic audiences, and I published books and academic papers. Though like many others, I felt myself to be engaged in a larger intellectual project (subaltern studies, […]
Thinking sociologically about the history of convicts and penal colonies
In the early 1990s I had the privilege of studying with David Garland, then teaching and researching in Edinburgh University’s Law School. He had recently published a wonderful book – Punishment and Modern Society: a study in social theory – which remains as relevant and important today as it was then. Week by week, Professor […]
Thinking About Convict Objects, in French Guiana
In the Musée Départemental Alexandre Franconie in Cayenne there is a room dedicated to the history of the French colonial bagne (prison). Among the displays of artwork copied from the paintings of the well-known convict artist Francis Lagrange are a handful of objects made by convict craftsmen. One is by Lagrange himself, a small and […]
Convicts, Collecting and Knowledge Production in the Nineteenth Century
In previous blogs, I have explored some of the circulations and connections that linked nations, colonies and empires, and wove together practices of punishment and penal labour across polities and imperial spaces. This included the sharing of official reports, the spread and adaptation of particular modes of convict punishment, and the intra-colonial mobility of personnel […]
Where Empires Meet
In a previous blog, I wrote on the theme of the politics of comparison, of the connected history of circulation and mobility that underpins the CArchipelago project team’s approach to the historiography, theory and archive of penal colonies. Research associate Christian De Vito has since expanded the discussion, discussing the basis of various approaches […]
The politics of comparison: writing a global history of punishment
The Carceral Archipelago project faces enormous challenges in writing the history of punishment as global history. Our research ranges across almost five centuries, from Portugal’s first use of convicts in North Africa in 1415 to the closure of Stalin’s gulags in the 1960s. As readers of this blog will know, we are working on the […]
Awful Things Began to Happen: Rapid Change of Ainu Homeland and Convict Labour as Seen by the Ainu, By Minako Sakata
The Kamikawa region is one of areas that today still has relatively a large population of the Ainu. It is also the site of the most famous land dispute between the Hokkaido Government and the Ainu in the early 20th century. The Hokkaido Aborigines Protection Act of 1899, containing some restrictions and leading to many […]
Legacies of a British penal colony: adivasis in the Andaman Islands
It is an unexpected pleasure to be back in the Andaman Islands for the first time in almost two years. I have been researching aspects of the Islands’ history for almost 15 years, and in 2013 completed a research project with two colleagues based in Ahmedabad: historian of science Dr Madhumita Mazumdar and anthropologist Professor […]
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