Global Convict Labour offers a global history of convict labour across many of the regimes of punishment that have appeared from Antiquity to the present, including transportation, prisons, workhouses and labour camps. The editors' essay surveys the available literature, and sets the theoretical basis to approach the issue. The fifteen chapters explore the genealogies of convict labour and its relationships with coloniality and governmentality. The volume re-establishes convict labour firmly within labour history, as one of the entangled, multiple labour relations that have punctuated human history. Similarly, it places convictism back within migration history at large, bridging the gap between the growing literature on convict transportation and research on slavery and other forms of free and bonded migration. Contributors are: Carlos Aguirre, David Arnold, Marc Buggeln, Timothy Coates, Christian G. De Vito, Mary Gibson, Miriam J. Groen-Vallinga, Stacey Hynd, Padraic Kenney, Alex Lichtenstein, Hamish Maxwell-Stewart, Alice Rio, Ricardo D. Salvatore, Jean-Lucien Sanchez, Pieter Spierenburg, Stephan Steiner, Laurens E. Tacoma, Heather Ann Thompson, Lynne Viola.

Table of Contents:
List of Illustrations List of Tables List of Contributors Editors’ preface Christian G. De Vito and Alex Lichtenstein Writing a global history of convict labour Christian G. De Vito and Alex Lichtenstein PART ONE GENEALOGIES OF CONVICT LABOUR Contextualising condemnation to hard labour in the Roman empire Miriam J. Groen-Vallinga and Laurens E. Tacoma Penal enslavement in the early middle ages Alice Rio Prison and convict labour in early modern Europe Pieter Spierenburg “An Austrian Cayenne.” Convict labour and deportation in the Habsburg empire of the early modern period Stephan Steiner The long view of convict labour in the Portuguese empire, 1415-1932 Timothy J. Coates Convict labour extraction and transportation from Britain and Ireland, 1615-1870 Hamish Maxwell-Stewart PART TWO COLONIALITY, ETHNICITY, RACIALISM AND CONVICT LABOUR Labouring for the Raj: convict work regimes in colonial India, 1836-1939 David Arnold The relegation of recidivists in French Guiana in the 19th and 20th Centuries Jean-Lucien Sanchez “…a weapon of immense value”? Convict labour in British colonial Africa, c. 1850-1950s Stacey Hynd Colonies of settlement or places of banishment and torment? Penal colonies and convict labour in Latin America, c. 1800-1940 Ricardo D. Salvatore and Carlos Aguirre PART THREE CONVICT LABOUR AND GOVERNMENTALITY Gender and convict labour: the Italian case in global context Mary Gibson Forced labour in Nazi concentration camps Marc Buggeln Historicising the Gulag Lynne Viola “A defilade of trick ponies”: work and physical experience in the political prison Padraic Kenney Rethinking working class struggle through the lens of the Carceral state: toward a labour history of inmates and guards Heather Ann Thompson Bibliography Index of places