Christian G. De Vito

Writing a Global History of Convict Labour

This bibliographic essay seeks to contribute to the understanding of convict labour from a global and long-term perspective. First the conditions conducive to the emergence and transformation of convict labour are addressed by framing this coercive labour form within broader classifications of labour relations and by discussing its connection with the problem of governmentality. Subsequently, an overview of the literature is undertaken in the form of a journey across time, space, and different regimes of punishment. Finally, the limitations of the available literature are discussed, the possibility of a longer-term (pre-1500) and global history of convict labour is considered, and some theoretical and methodological approaches are suggested that could favour this task.

Locating penal transportation: punishment, space and place c. 1750-1900

[From introduction] The transformation of former prisons to sites of “dark tourism” reflects a recent trend in the use of decommissioned buildings for alternative purposes, such as museums and other heritage sites, which particularly emphasise “representations of death, disaster or atrocity for pedagogical and commercial purposes” (Walby and Piche, 2011: 452). Prisons are spaces that hold a morbid fascination for visitors who are unlikely to ever encounter such a space in their everyday lives (Strange and Kempa, 2003). Far from a traditional tourist site, the prison museum is built upon consumer desire to access the inaccessible; to glimpse a life on the ‘inside’ and all its assumed horrors from the comfort of being on the ‘outside’ (Turner, 2013) – with the choice and liberty, of course, to enter, to leave, to accept or to reject any given exhibition or display (see Hall, 1973). Prison museums cater, on the one hand, to a market of visitors seeking such tourist experiences for entertainment (Adams, 2001; Schrift, 2004). On the other hand, they function to educate visitors about penal pasts, shaping contemporary understandings through engagement with carceral histories (see, for example, Baker, 2014: 1). In this chapter we attend to the ways in which a particular prison museum – the Galleries of Justice, in Nottingham, U.K. – informs and entertains while making the past usable in the present.The file associated with this article has a special embargo of 12 months from publication with the permission of the publisher.Bargaining with reading habit is no need. Reading is not kind of something sold that you can take or not. It is a thing that will change your life to life better. It is the thing that will give you many things around the world and this universe, in the real world and here after. As what will be given by this historical geographies of prisons unlocking the usable carceral past routledge research in historical geography, how can you bargain with the thing that has many benefits for you?

Convict labour in the southern borderlands of Latin America (c. 1750-1910s). Comparative perspectives

Convict labour – defined as “the work performed by individuals under penal and/or administrative control” 2 – has hitherto remained marginal within both theoretical debates on “free” and “unfree” labour, and the literature on the relationship between the abolition process of chattel slavery and the persistence of other forms of coerced labour. In this respect, this chapter aims to bring it back into these debates, by making convict presence visible and by interpreting the role of convict labour at the crossroad of multiple regimes of punishment and labour relations. In particular, the essay addresses three broad questions: What historical conditions favoured the exploitation of convict labour as part of the larger process of commodification of labour? In which economic sectors did convicts work, and how did their tasks differ from those of other labourers? How did convict transportation interact with other labour migrations?