For those of you that missed it, here’s a recap of the last
New History Lab ‘The Carceral Archipelago: A Global History of Penal Colonies’
led by Professor Clare Anderson, with short talks by Kellie Moss and Katy Roscoe.
Professor Clare Anderson is seven
months into acting as principal investigator for the five year ERC-funded
project ‘The Carceral Archipelago.’ Prof. Anderson started off by showing on a
map of a world, one at a time, the various penal colonies of each nation or
continent – British, European, Latin American, Russian and Asian – that existed
between 1415 and 1960. Prof. Anderson then incorporated all these
transportation flows onto one map of the world, which was so jam-packed with
penal colonies, that, as Prof. Anderson put it, ‘the question becomes not
“where are there penal colonies?” but “where aren’t there penal colonies?”. She
highlighted that this is the first project to try and theorise all these
multifarious convict flows within global labour or migration history, as penal
transportation tends to be studied within national histories of crime and
punishment. By doing so the project challenges several widely held assumptions
- namely that the transition from ‘unfree’ to ‘free’ labour underpinned the movement
to modernity, that Europeans were largely ‘free’ migrants and non-Europeans
were largely unfree, and that transportation was a movement that started in the
metropole and ended up somewhere in the empire. Instead Prof. Anderson argued
that penal transportation was characterised by circulations of people, both convicts and administrators, and
ideas, on different types of discipline and labour practices. People were
transported to far more locales and for far longer than has been recognised, to
be used as a tool of national and imperial expansion through their labour. The transformation of spaces from one type of
confinement to another, and the overlap of disciplinary practices from other
forms of labour migration, e.g. enslavement and indenture, is visible only by viewing convict
transportation in the context of a global network – which in turn has major
implications for the legacy of transportation across the world today. This work
is being done by an international team of researchers working on an
ever-increasing number of case-studies – so far work is being done on
Australia, Russia, Latin America, Zanzibar, Japan by a team of researchers,
including Prof. Anderson’s own work on Mazaruni in British Guiana and other
parts of Caribbean. As well as mapping and enumerating convict flows in the
period, the meaning of race, the creation of gendered space, the management of
work and the operation of convict agency will form the comparative indicators
around which these various case studies will coalesce. The methodology will
centre around what Ann Stoler dubbed the ‘politics of comparison’ which
involves considering what people at the time compared penal transportation to.
This should enable the project to bring the history of labour migration into
dialogue with the history of confinement.
One of the students working on
her PhD as part of the project, Kellie Moss, spoke about her research project
entitled ‘Free or Unfree Labour: The
British Empire and the Establishment of the Swan River Colony.’ Kellie
discussed the transportation of convicts to Western Australia and their influence
on the establishment of Swan River Colony. She highlighted the difficulties settlers
faced when trying to found a settlement, including a lack of infrastructure and
manpower, and how convicts, who were often handpicked for their abilities at
trade, helped the establishment develop into an economically thriving and
socially driven colony. Her research works to undo common misconceptions of
convicts as Britain’s dregs ‘dumped’ on Australia, instead investing the convict experience with
a degree of agency and get up and go that complicates simplistic binaries of
unfree and free labour. Her work is all the more valuable considering the short
shrift that Western Australia has received in the study of Australian history.
Kellie also drew attention to the displacement of aboriginals in the
establishment of Swan River Colony and the continuing legacy of convict
Australia on the environment, demography and identities of those living in
Western Australia.
Another
student with a PhD studentship on the project, Katy Roscoe, spoke about her
research on spatiality on the Australian penal colonies of Rottnest and
Cockatoo Islands from 1839 to 1918. She saw space as physically and socially
constructed within a range of possibilities that were geographically
determined. Space operated on
interconnected levels: the exterior – position between maritime and mainland geographies;
the interior – buildings and natural environment of island; the individual –
convicts ‘carving out’ their own space. She discussed the first kind of space: the exterior.
Using maps of the two islands, Katy suggested that their different
positions had profound impact on their usage. The proximity of Cockatoo Island to
the mainland on all sides made it ideal for exploitation of prisoners as a
labour supply. However, the natural geography – in the form of the malleable
limestone and swimmable distance to the shore – undermined its’ penal role as concealment
and escape were constant threats. Rottnest Island is more cut off, a solitary
speck 11 miles out to sea from Fremantle. Its purpose was political, as British
understandings of aboriginal crime made imperial administrators keen to break
up tribal networks of loyalty. Instead aboriginals were implanted into a
British imperial ‘legal’ space where authorities tried to alter the aboriginal
relationship to the land, and by so doing assimilate them into possible future
citizens.
If you are interested in learning more about the project follow
Clare (@sysgak) or Katy (@katwee_) or search #CArchipelago on twitter. Alternatively
visit the project website: www2.le.ac.uk/departments/history/research/grants/CArchipelago/CArchipelago
