Calcutta Review


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Writings on India


Book Description

John Stuart Mill worked for thirty-five years in the Examiner's Office of the East India Company, first as a junior clerk and finally as head of the Office. His activities there are among the least examined aspects of his career. Mill was somewhat reluctant, because of his official position, to comment publicly on the Company's affairs, but occasionally he put forwards views in essays and before parliamentary committees that alert us to important elements in his thought and career. Further, when in the aftermath of the Indian Mutiny a succession of bills was brought forward in parliament to abolish the Companty, Mill was its chief spokesman in a succession of carefully argued pamphlets that reveal even more of his views. This volume offers the first opportunity for a fill assessment of Mill's contribution, including as it does the first reprinting of the essays, parliamentary evidence, and pamphlets, and adding an appendix of an annotated record and location of his despatches.










Empire of Convicts


Book Description

Empire of Convicts focuses on male and female Indians incarcerated in Southeast Asia for criminal and political offenses committed in colonial South Asia. From the seventeenth century onward, penal transportation was a key strategy of British imperial rule, exemplified by deportations first to the Americas and later to Australia. Case studies from the insular prisons of Bengkulu, Penang, and Singapore illuminate another carceral regime in the Indian Ocean World that brought South Asia and Southeast Asia together through a global system of forced migration and coerced labor. A major contribution to histories of crime and punishment, prisons, law, labor, transportation, migration, colonialism, and the Indian Ocean World, Empire of Convicts narrates the experiences of Indian bandwars (convicts) and shows how they exercised agency in difficult situations, fashioning their own worlds and even becoming “their own warders.” Anand A. Yang brings long journeys across kala pani (black waters) to life in a deeply researched and engrossing account that moves fluidly between local and global contexts.