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Indian Convict Workers in Southeast Asia in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries
Anand A. Yang
University of Washington
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Convicts transported from South Asia to Southeast Asia in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were part of a global system of forced migration. Along with the convicts sent to Australia from Britain and Ireland, they were, as scholars of transportation have rightly insisted, |
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part of a larger international and intercontinental flow of forced migration including ... French, Spanish and Russian convicts, and "bonded" Indian and Melanesian contract labour. After 1820 a quarter of a million convicts were shipped across the world's oceans to colonise Australia, New Caledonia, Singapore and French Guiana, and to meet labour demand in Gibraltar, Bermuda, Penang, Malacca and Mauritius.... Transportation, like the recruiting of slaves and the contracting of bonded workers, was complementary to the international migration of free European peoples before 1914. Convictism was a labour system existing in many countries of the world in the nineteenth century.1 | |
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Indeed, the history of transported convicts can be located "within the comparative literature of international 'unfree' labour migration" and tied to |
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such "mainstream" topics as: the slave-trade from Atlantic and Indian Ocean Africa; the Trans-Saharan slave-trade; the international migration of indentured labourers from South and East Asia; the large-scale mobilization of various kinds of 'unfree' migrant labour within colonial Africa and South Asia; the migration of indentured servants from Britain to North America and the Caribbean; and the uses made of all this vast and varied flow of humanity on the one hand and its own historical agency, lived experience and cultural history on the other, in destinations around the world.2 | |
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The flows of convict workers between 1787 and 1920 involved significant numbers, especially to Australia. The traffic from Britain—extensively studied because of its centrality in the peopling of Australia—involved as many as 80,000 to New South Wales between 1788 and 1840; 67,000 to 69,000 to Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania) between 1801 and 1852; and two smaller cohorts of 3,000 and 9,700 people during the 1840s, 1850s, and 1860s. These forced migrations followed on the heels of the transportation of some 50,000 convicted felons from Britain to North America, principally to Maryland and Virginia, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Smaller in scale and far less known are the movements of convicts from South Asia to Southeast Asia. India dispatched 4,000–6,000 convicts to Bengkulen between 1787 and 1825 and 15,000 to the Straits Settlements between 1790 and 1860. Another 1,000–1,500 were transported from Ceylon to Malacca in the Straits Settlements between 1849 and 1873, and several thousand more were sent to Burma and to areas outside of Southeast Asia, principally Mauritius between 1815 and 1837 and the Andaman Islands after 1857.3 |
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This paper tracks the history of convicts from South Asia to their Southeast Asian penal destinations in order to assess their roles as "convict workers." That is, it examines their roles as members of a labor force that was recruited and organized to service the projects of the emerging British Empire in the region in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. |
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