Convicts: A Global History by Clare Anderson (review)

Convicts: A Global History is a huge temporal and geographical undertaking. A hundred and thirty individual penal destinations scattered across nineteen different polities are covered in the pages of this remarkable book. While the weight lies with the Western Empires, non-European utilisation of convicted labour is also discussed. This is especially true of Qing China and Tokugawa and Meiji Japan. Yet, it is not just geography, or chronological sweep (the book covers five centuries of penal practice), that gives Convicts scale. In an age where much historical writing has retreated into a series of self-contained sub-disciplines, Anderson fashions her narrative out of a swathe of cultural, economic and social thematic detail. The end result is a masterful account of "punitive mobility."