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This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1989.

Across the Kala Pani : the global and local contexts of penal transportation -- "Bundwars, Malays, Sebundy sepoys, and Neas men": The Bengkulu world of the Khan brothers, 1797-1825 -- "Kumpanee ke noukur" : rajas and robbers in Penang, 1790s-1870s -- "Near China beyond the seas far far distant from Juggernath": convict workers and the making of colonial Singapore, 1825-1870s -- Epilogue. life after life : the afterlives of bandwars in the straits settlements.

AbstractPrison labour was an integral part of the penal order in colonial India in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Especially in Bengal, such coerced labour, overwhelmingly male, was increasingly deployed in handicrafts production rather than in extramural construction projects, a regimen that led to the development of a prison-handicraft complex. Colonial efforts to refine this system focused largely on increasing the severity of the conditions of incarceration and indoor work, but also on the conflicting goal of maximizing the profits of its handiwork. Prisons thus emerged as effective sites of handicrafts production, with the products of their forced labour facilitating the revival of the crafts industry whose growth is generally attributed to the rise of an international arts and crafts movement in Britain and India.

South Asian convicts transported to Southeast Asia in the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries were part of a global system of forced migration. Together with
slaves and bonded and indentured laborers, they helped settle and colonize the overseas
European empires. No wonder, then, that recent writings have designated them
as "convict workers," an emphasis that shifts attention away from their earlier characterization
as "professional and habitual criminals" to highlight their actual lived experiences
in the penal settlements. Indeed, Indian "convict workers" filled a critical need
for labor in Southeast Asia, playing an especially significant role in carrying out the
public works projects that were so essential to the establishment and consolidation of
the British Empire in the region. This convict system came to an end in the late nineteenth
century.

The course of events leading up to 1947, when independence and partition came to the Indian subcontinent, has colored retrospectiveassessments of Hindu-Muslim relations in many perceptible ways.Polarities in religion and culture receive inordinate attention as theharbingers of the great divide yet to come, as do political developments asturning points in the eventual separate destinies of many Hindus and Muslims in South Asia.

The late nineteenth century was a period of selective institution-building by the British in India. Government's efforts were directed primarily towards the development of a more effective control and communications infrastructure. The initial impetus for such changes in Bengal came during the energetic administration of Sir George Campbell, the Lieutenant Governor from 1871 to 1874. Under his auspices, attempts were made to extend the administrative machinery down to the sub-district levels by the creation of sub-deputy collectorships and the revitalization of such local officials askanungos(registrars),patwaris(village accountants) andchaukidars(village watchmen). Better connections to local society were also sought through institutions which linked government to its allies, such as municipal, local, and district boards, and the Court of Wards.