7 - Conclusion

Summary

Subaltern Lives has argued for a biographical centring of men and women in histories of and in the Indian Ocean. It has used a life-writing approach to piece together fragments from the archives in order to explore issues around convict transportation, penal settlements and colonies, society and social transformation and the networking of Empire. Many of the lives presented in the book lack the narrative beginnings and endings that underpin traditional historical biography. However, if we shift our postcolonial gaze to move along and through archives and their institutional borders, it turns our attention towards people who have been absent from ‘history’, and opens up new ways of thinking about Empire. The book has not been concerned primarily with the production of ‘typical’ experiences, or with a search for ‘authenticity’, but rather with the use of men and women's lives as historical kaleidoscopes into some of the small and large questions of colonialism. Each chapter has suggested one possible interpretation of an individual's life, and the way in which it is embedded in its broader context. Given the limitations of subaltern life-writing work most chapters have also taken a prosopographical approach to incorporate other individuals into the narrative too.