On 23 August 2022, I was hugely honoured to be invited to present findings from our Leverhulme Trust funded project at the “International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition”, held at the Nelson Mandela Centre for African Culture on the island of Mauritius, in the Continue Reading
Convicts from French Indochina in the Global French Empire
Throughout the ninety-year French colonization of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos (1863-1954), approximately eight thousand prisoners were exiled to twelve different geographical locations the length and breadth of the colonial French Empire. From Gabon to Guiana, there was hardly a corner to which these prisoners were not sent. Prisoners from Indochina Continue Reading
Remembering Indian Convicts in Southeast Asia
From the end of the eighteenth century up to the early 1860s, the East India Company transported c. 25,000 convicts to penal settlements across Southeast Asia. Most came from British India (including Burma), with smaller numbers from the Crown Colony of Sri Lanka. The earliest destinations were Bencoolen and the Continue Reading
Shifting The Gaze on Histories of Penal Transportation
In some of our recent writing (available freely here and here) and in some of our recent talks we have been arguing in favour of approaches to the history of convict transportation that started in the receiving destinations: the penal colonies. Our ambition was to move the focus of our Continue Reading