Transportation, Deportation and Exile: Perspectives from the Colonies in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Abstract

The essays in this volume provide a new perspective on the history of convicts and penal colonies. They demonstrate that the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were a critical period in the reconfiguration of empires, imperial governmentality, and punishment, including through extensive punitive relocation and associated extractive labour. Ranging across the global contexts of Africa, Asia, Australasia, Japan, the Americas, the Pacific, Russia, and Europe, and exploring issues of criminalization, political repression, and convict management alongside those of race, gender, space, and circulation, this collection offers a perspective from the colonies that radically transforms accepted narratives of the history of empire and the history of punishment. In this introduction, we argue that a colony-centred perspective reveals that, during a critical period in world history, convicts and penal colonies created new spatial hierarchies, enabled the incorporation of territories into spheres of imperial influence, and forged new connections and distinctions between “metropoles” and “colonies”. Convicts and penal colonies enabled the formation of expansive and networked global configurations and processes, a factor hitherto unappreciated in the literature.

National identity and beliefs about historical linguicide are associated with support for exclusive language policies among the Ukrainian linguistic majority

“…Russia’s extended linguistic influence on its neighbouring country has occurred due to historical events such as the rule of the Russian Empire from 1721 to 1917 and political dominance of the USSR from 1922 to 1991 (e.g., Coulmas, 2018; Hosking & Wallis, 1997). However, according to some historians, Russification of the Ukrainian language became more intense during the years of punitive massive deportations (1930–1953; De Vito et al, 2018) and famine-genocide (1932–1933; Tauger, 2015). Moreover, the post-colonial dominance of the Russian language and culture in the region has led to the Ukrainian language being shunned in the public sphere (e.g., Korostelina, 2013; Kuzio, 2006).…”

Colonising the penal body: transit of the convicts from Bengal to the Malay Peninsula

“…As mentioned earlier that British Indian convicts came from present-day South Asia, which covers Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and around the rim of the Bay of Bengal to Myanmar (De Vito, Clare, & Ulbe, 2018, p. 11; Pieris, 2009, p. 66; Tan, 2015, p. 39). As British India was the home of diverse ethnicities and cultures, I have chosen to use “South Asian” instead of “Indian” convicts in this article.…”

The island, the prison, and the colony: Sardinian carceral and colonial geographies

“…Conversely, the ‘revisionist’ school of prison studies tended to disjoin the prison from colonial institutions and practices, ignoring how penal colonies and convict transportation coexisted with modern incarceration and did not fade away once the latter became dominant (Gibson, 2011; Neilson, 2015). The new historians revealed a rather Eurocentric approach within prison history, which neglected to recognise the importance of penal colonies, often located on islands, as integral components that were not merely peripheral to the continent and its carceral system (De Vito et al., 2018). Furthermore, by linking incarceration to convict transportation, the new historiographic approach rejects the idea of confinement as mere immobility.…”