A Global History of Convicts and Penal Colonies

One of the difficulties about becoming halfway competent in a field of research is the propensity to become temporally and geographically restricted. I presume I am not alone in the concern that, as knowledge in our chosen field deepens, the boundaries of this knowledge can shrink. As a historical archaeologist who has been researching the deployment and management of convict labor in the Australian context for nearly twenty years, I know that I have become (often by necessity) fixated upon certain places and periods. In some respects, this focus has allowed me to become an expert in such areas, but this has been at the expense of a good contextual grounding. A Global History of Convicts and Penal Colonies has gone a long way to arrest this slide toward academic particularity and will prove a staple research reference from this point forward.