Whatever their political perspective, historians of labour and work tend to associate the evolution of labour relations with the teleology of freedom. Various coercive labour practices – slavery, serfdom, indenture, vassalage – are regarded as giving way over time to free but commodified forms of labour, particularly with the expansion of capitalist modernity, free contract, and wage work. Yet, in nearly every society and in nearly every historical era, enforced work has in fact been deployed as a form of penal and/or administrative control of selected populations. Taking this perpetual nexus of labour and penality as its framework, this article examines the historically ubiquitous institution of convict labour from both a global and long-term perspective, and its place within a constellation of forms of unfree labour linked to the development of modernity. It does so in three main ways, corresponding to three mutually reinforcing sections of the bibliographic survey that follows.
In the first section, we frame convict labour within broader classifications of labour relations, in order to constitute penal work as a category of historical analysis, in much the same way as slavery, serfdom, wage labour, indentured labour, and so on have served as specific analytical categories and investigative tropes within labour historiography. Further, we point to the peculiar, socially constructed nature of the concept “convict”, constituted as it is by legal regimes, state power, and private action that link unfreedom and punishment. Here we emphasize the need to address both the objective, structural factors that defined penal labour within a larger grid of relations of production and its subjective, experiential aspects by which prisoners defined their own consciousness. Finally, the question is raised of which conditions have proved most conducive to the emergence and transformation of convict labour over time, and the advantages of an approach that integrates economic, cultural, and political factors are underlined. In particular, we call attention to the role of penal labour in defining the nature of state power and in producing specific types of citizen and subject.
In the second section we provide a selective overview of some of the literature on convict labour in the form of an itinerary through time, space, and different regimes of punishment. By placing convict labour at the centre of our analysis, we aim to transcend the fragmentation of the existing historiography on the interconnections of labour, penality, and the denial of freedom. With this survey, the article points to the interconnections among different forms of punishment and the broader social, political, cultural, and economic context in which both penal labour and punishment more broadly have developed.
In the third and final section of the article we consider the possibility of a pre-capitalist longue durée of penal labour, extending our analysis prior to 1500, through a brief examination of transportation and imprisonment in ancient and medieval times. Moreover, we raise the question of how a genuinely global history of convict labour might be written, that is, a history that does not simply integrate existing knowledge and ongoing research on different parts of the world into pre-existing models of penal history, but that self-consciously looks for methodological approaches that avoid Eurocentric perspectives and point instead to transnational linkages as a constituent element in penal labour regimes.
Classifying Convict Labour
Convict labour can best be understood as a phenomenon located at the crossroads of two dynamic social processes: the commodification of labour and the enforced social definition of the “convict” as a person who has forfeited his or her right to freedom. Examination of the first process reminds us that convict labour has proved compatible with diverse modes of production and is perfectly compatible with modern social relations, such as the expansion of capitalism and the spread of wage labour. The second process calls attention to the importance of the state in shaping unfree labour relations, while also stressing subjective perceptions and representations of convict labour.
To frame convict labour within a broader history of labour relations, we might begin by considering the taxonomy constructed by the Global Collaboratory on the History of Labour Relations for a long-term project being conducted at the IISH “to establish a quantitative overview of labour relations worldwide for the period 1500–2000”.Footnote 1 In this context, convicts appear as two sub-categories of “tributary labourers”:Footnote 2 “forced labourers” and “tributary slaves”. The former are defined as “those who have to work for the polity, and are remunerated mainly in kind”, and include corvée labourers and conscripted soldiers as well as convicts. The “tributary slaves” are “those who are owned by and work for the polity indefinitely (deprived of the right to leave, to refuse to work, or to receive compensation for their labour)”. The Global Collaboratory regards forced labourers in concentration camps as an example of these. The main advantage of this classification lies in the fact that it stresses the role of the state in the process of definition, selection, and exploitation of convict labour. However, this presents a serious limitation, since it almost exclusively underlines the otherness of convict labour in relation to the process of commodification of labour power.Footnote 3 In so doing, it seems to leave little space for the understanding of those connections convict labour has maintained with other forms of free and unfree labour, setting it largely outside of important considerations of political economy.
A potentially more dynamic means of including convict labourers as part of the global working classes is provided by Marcel van der Linden in his collection of essays, Workers of the World.Footnote 4 Van der Linden's work challenges the idea that only the labour power of free wage labourers is commodified, and thus opens up the possibility of considering various forms of both free and unfree labour as part of the process of commodification. By offering a far more supple definition of the “working class” than traditional Marxian accounts, one that is not dependent on the classic evolution of free wage labour and thus includes marginalized workers of all types, Van der Linden incorporates the experience of the majority of the population of the “Global South” into his account. In particular, he has distinguished four different types of possible labour commodification: “autonomous commodification, in which the carrier of labour power is also its possessor, and heteronomous commodification, in which the carrier of labour power is not its possessor; in both cases, the carrier's labour power can be offered by the carrier him- or herself or by another person”. Most importantly for our purposes, Van der Linden identifies the “coerced commodification of labour power” as an important aspect of the making of a global working class. Indeed, using this model, convict labour can be considered as commodified labour insofar as the labour power of the convicts – who are carriers but not possessors of their labour power – is commodified by the authorities, under whose penal and/or administrative control they are held (at least initially).
The classification proposed by Van der Linden has a fundamental advantage in that it allows us to envisage convict labour in its connections with other forms of free and unfree labour rather than setting it off as an anomalous category. In so doing, it supplements the first classification proposed by the Collaboratory, joining in that project's effort to identify a global working class while recognizing the close ties between penality and the historical experience of labour and work in many contexts, including the commodification of labour. As we will argue in the following section, convict labour has been a part of fluid coercive networks in the context of early modern and modern colonial empires as well as in more recent and even contemporary labour systems. Empirical research has repeatedly shown its multiple intertwining with other forms of unfree labour as well as with free labour. In fact, in many penal colonies convicts prepared the ground for indentured and free labour, indentured workers became convicts when caught after trying to escape or as a supplementary punishment, slaves and free workers condemned to death could be “liberated” upon transportation, and ex-convicts sometimes signed contracts of indenture or migrated on to new destinations.Footnote 5
Nor is convict labour imbricated with other labour relations only on a structural level. Although a very complex topic for research, convicts’ self-perception of their work also plays an important role here. This is the case, for example, with some ex-concentration camp prisoners who tried to make sense of their experience by evoking slavery. With reference to another context, Clare Anderson has shown that prisoners transported within the Indian Ocean sometimes did not perceive themselves as convicts at all and associated their experience with that of indenture, a status more common in their own families and communities. And a deep tradition of African-American cultural expression has made the convict labourer a central character in the longing for liberation in a society marked by racial repression.Footnote 6
Such subjectivity plays an especially important role in the case of convict labour, given its very nature. Besides the commodification of labour, the process of defining the “convict” is the other social dynamic that shapes convict labour. While concepts such as wage labour or indentured work directly point to particular forms of labour relations rooted in contract,Footnote 7 the expression “convict labour” points to an immanent labour relation into which individuals enter only after they have undergone a process of enforced social definition as convicts, a social definition that brands them as criminals, deviants, or non-citizens in need of isolation and correction. Therefore, although economic rationales have sometimes played a fundamental role in defining the geography and morphology of punishment and work, the impact of legal and administrative categories on these processes should never be underestimated. Moreover, since punishment (and sometimes other administrative forms of control) usually implies a definite amount of time, the experience of convict labour represents only a limited portion of the convict's life experience. Being a convict is often a temporary juridical or administrative status that eventually entails the reintegration of the prisoner into specific labour relations. It can be expected therefore that the convict's labour identity and ethics either remain connected to a previous occupation (or non-occupation) and location in the labour market and social order, or are projected after the end of punishment, as in the case of many transported convicts who subsequently settled in the new penal colonies.
Moreover, not only juridical and administrative factors, but also social, political, economic, and cultural processes are involved in the definition of “convict” (as well as in that of related concepts such as prisoner, internee, and inmate). As the sociology of punishment and the critical approaches to criminology have stressed, even in the highly formalized legal systems of contemporary democracies, political and media discourses on criminality, race, and security shape ideologies of punishment. The possibility of accessing the right of defence, the structure of penal codes and juridical administration, and the mentality of police, social, judicial, and penal actors all play a decisive role in the social construction of deviancy, crime, and convicts.Footnote 8 It seems safe to assume that this discretionality increases in the case of medieval and early modern contexts, where informal agencies and extrajudicial mechanisms played a fundamental role in punishment, and that it reaches its zenith in the case of administrative measures taken under “states of exception”, especially in situations of war, colonization, and non-democratic regimes, that is, in most of the situations where convict labour has actually appeared in history. In democratic societies, such exceptionality may still be associated with the perpetuation of historical, racial, or ethnic domination, as seems to be the case for the current world leader in incarceration, the United States.Footnote 9
For these reasons, while we might still want to build a taxonomy of labour relations that includes convict labour and allows quantitative comparative insights, in trying to make sense of convict labour any reification of the phenomenon should be avoided. One possible way to proceed is through a double move. On the one hand, we propose to define convict labour loosely as the work performed by individuals under penal and/or administrative control. This broad definition binds together different institutions across various periods and within all sorts of political regime. At the same time, it clearly differentiates convict labour from other historical situations where either forced labour or penal and/or administrative control were present, but did not come together. For instance, slavery or POW labour as such are clearly separated from convict labour; the work performed by slaves and POWs is considered convict labour here only insofar as it is enforced as the consequence of a supplementary penal or administrative measure (for example, as a punishment for a crime or a disciplinary infraction). Beyond this separation, however, areas of interpenetration between convict labour and other forms of forced labour become visible and can be addressed in empirical research.Footnote 10 Ultimately, because of its pragmatic rather than prescriptive approach, this definition points to the fact that the question “What is convict labour?” can be answered only with reference to specific historical contexts. On the other hand, with the goal of generalizing the findings of localized studies, the question “Why convict labour?” could be asked, or, to put it another way, empirical findings could be used to generalize about the historical conditions under which convict labour has been produced and exploited in the larger process of the commodification of labour.
Such a procedure entails understanding convict labour not in isolation but as part of an integrated labour market, that is, in dialectic with other (free and unfree) labour relations and their mutual combinations. And it requires an approach that brings together different strands of the literature that have stressed either economic explanations or social-political-cultural factors, such as racial or colonial domination. As in the pioneering work of Georg Rusche and Otto Kirchheimer, the significance of economic approaches to punishment lies in pointing to the connection between economic cycles, incarceration, and convict labour.Footnote 11 Their approach prompts consideration of the place of convict labour in the labour market of particular economic sectors, the disciplining effect of convict labour on the free workforce, the productivity of convict labour, and so on. However, in order to avoid deterministic economic explanations, the importance of other factors also needs to be recognized. The function of convict labour, its characteristics, and its connection with other forms of labour relations have depended not just on rational economic motivations but also on social constructions that have influenced both the way the convicts have been imagined, selected, and differentiated, and the forms of punishment, the related institutions, and their localization. Discourses of ethnicity, race, class, and gender, in particular, have shaped notions of criminality as a whole and the lives of individuals under penal and administrative control. Precisely because coercive networks are highly differentiated and fluid, the coexistence of different forms of punishment has been possible and “rehabilitative” and “punitive” work have coexisted in differentiated parts of the convict population, in differentiated spaces, and at different times in the biography of a single individual.
Thinking about these non-economic aspects of convict labour brings us back to the widely influential question of “governmentality”, a concept coined by Foucault in the late 1970s, and central to the subsequent deployment of Foucauldian accounts of the role of incarceration in constituting modern forms of state power. From this vantage point, historians might consider how different types of penal labour regime have served as an expression and projection of particular forms of bio-political sovereignty, one that can knit together conceptualizations of citizenship (or non-citizenship), work, and the legal (or extra-legal) power to punish at particular historical moments. Who is defined as “criminal” and why, how the state commands prisoners’ capacity for productive labour and in what form, and how such unfree labour is conceptualized as part of a larger social order all deserve further historical scrutiny.Footnote 12
Nevertheless, in understanding how economic, political, social, and cultural factors have shaped the penal strategies of empires, states, and local authorities, the limits of governmentality also need to be investigated, as even Foucault himself came to acknowledge.Footnote 13 After all, even the most powerful authority has neither ever had an actual monopoly on social control and coercive discourses nor unlimited resources to implement them. Shifts from prisons to labour camps, for instance, have also stemmed from concrete problems such as systematic overcrowding, fiscal limitations, inadequate prison buildings, and the (perceived) lack of professional training of prisoners and guards. Similarly, the low productivity of convict labour, often exacerbated by prisoner resistance, has sometimes modified and even stopped plans for economic exploitation, transforming the everyday reality of many prisons and penal colonies into “a simple struggle for financial self-sufficiency”.Footnote 14 Nor should governmentality be regarded as an ahistorical and impersonal force; in this respect, investigations of the agency of the historical actors need to be systematically extended.
Drawing on the classificatory model we sketch above, the following two sections address the available literature on convict labour. In the next section of this article we attempt to survey this literature. In doing so, we make no claim for completeness, not least because of limited space, the need for selection, and the disproportionate reference to scholarship in English. We aim rather to show the potentiality of the concept of convict labour for bringing together different strands of literature that have so far largely remained separated.Footnote 15 We therefore bind together knowledge and issues stemming from, among other areas of scholarship, the history of the penitentiary, the history of transportation, the history of the Nazi camps, Gulag studies, and the sociology and criminology of contemporary punishment. In the third and final section we attempt a synthesis of this literature as a model of global convict labour history, rather than from the perspective of each fragmented sub-discipline. We point to its main limitations and gaps and, in so doing, we seek to provide an agenda for future research in this field.
A Global Survey Of Convict Labour
One of the earliest deployments of convict labour came in maritime transport and naval combat. Yet, contrary to a widespread popular image, no convict rowers were chained to the oars of the galleys during the Roman Empire – with the exception of Ptolemaic Egypt – and their use was also largely limited aboard early fourteenth-century Venetian and fifteenth-century Florentine galleys and in the navy of the Ottoman sultan Suleiman the Magnificent in the early sixteenth century.Footnote 16 While prisoners of war were sometimes used as galley slaves, the use of “free” (that is, conscripted or hired) rowers was largely preferred, not least because unlike prisoners they could be armed. It was the growing difficulty of sustaining galley costs that led private and state actors to turn to slaves and convicts during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Only then did the degredados, together with slaves in Asia and Brazil, become essential on Portuguese galleys, and the forzados, consisting mainly of vagabonds, gypsies, and moriscos, come to make up the majority of workmen on Spanish galleys.
In the French case the use of convict labour on the galleys reached its climax in the second half of the seventeenth century.Footnote 17 Slaves – mainly North Africans (called Turks), but at times also schismatic Russians and Greeks, West Africans, and American Iroquois Indians – acted as the elite among the rowers. Lower in the rank stood the unskilled mass of the forçats, condemned to the galley à perpetuité or for a fixed period for crimes such as bigamy, theft, blasphemy, vagabondage, and mendicancy, and for their belonging to the so-called Religion pretendue reformée after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. In order to counter the shortage of manpower, in the mid-1680s the service was reorganized by the Secretary of State for the Navy, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, with 4,870 new forçats and 1,401 new slaves joining the forty galleys of the French fleet. By the early eighteenth century, however, galleys were phased out in favour of the technical superiority and the higher firepower of naval sailing ships. When the Corps des Galères was officially abolished in 1748 “its few remaining vessels were essentially prison hulks for the accommodation of convicts who slept aboard, and usually worked ashore by day”.Footnote 18 The hulks harboured in the London docks in the same period had the same function.
A similar trajectory of galley service can be observed in the Islamic empires. As Anthony Gorman has argued, in the sixteenth century penal or forced labour (sukhri or tashkir) was employed especially by the Ottomans “when the need for oarsmen saw service in the galleys (kürek) commonly prescribed as a punishment”.Footnote 19 Three centuries later, however, sentence to the galleys had been transformed into work in agriculture and small-scale industry. Together with free labour, this “employment with chained feet” played a significant role in Muhammad Ali's programme of “modernization” in early nineteenth-century Egypt.
Thus, the sectoral deployment of penal labour often shifted according to shifts in political economy. Besides galley service and public works, penal servitude developed in the early modern period, especially in the form of transportation, to aid in populating and securing newly acquired imperial territory.Footnote 20 The rise of the Iberian empires typically involved a shift from presidios along the borders of Spain and Portugal to locations overseas. In the case of Portugal, havens and exile locales at home were phased out (with the exception of Castro Marim) and, according to Timothy Coates, at least 50,000 convicts and sinners were forced to relocate, largely overseas, in the early modern period.Footnote 21 Their destinations were mainly the new colonies in Goa, coastal West Africa (Azores, Madeira, Principe, São Tomé, and Cape Verde) and later, between 1740 and 1822, Pará, Maranhão, and Santa Catarina in Brazil. In the Spanish case, the mercury mines of Almadén and the maritime arsenal of Cartagena, La Carraca (Cadiz), and El Ferrol (Galicia) and the northern African presidios of Oran, Ceuta and Melilla, Peñón de Vélez, and Peñón de Alhucemas continued to host presidiarios involved in the heavy manual work of constructing, repairing, and maintaining roads, canals, fortifications, and other military facilities. To these, the Filipino presidios and then increasingly the Spanish American presidios were added.
Punishment, transportation, and penal labour all played instrumental roles in the capacity of the Iberian empires to expand their global frontiers, gain access to economic resources, and extend their political and military reach in this period.Footnote 22 Similarly, the Dutch convict transportation system played an integral role in linking distant imperial outposts. In this case, however, most traffic in forced labour was overseen by a private entity, the Dutch East India Company (VOC), which controlled the Indian Ocean flow of convicts between Batavia and the Cape of Good Hope in southern Africa. As Kerry Ward has shown, transported convict labour proved important to the “networks of empire” thrown across various territories by the VOC, which in doing so helped constitute “multiple and intersecting fields of partial sovereignty”.Footnote 23
Security and penal considerations played a significant role in the matching of prisoners and destinations. For instance, Ruth Pike has noted that in the Spanish Empire recidivist prisoners were less likely to be sent to north Africa, while deserters were shipped mainly to the New World.Footnote 24 However, the labour needs of the various presidios represented the general guiding principle for the choice of destination. Moreover, while penal servitude in metropolitan Spain was exclusively linked to the state's economic interests, in Spanish America, prisoners sentenced to hard labour by the colonial courts were also leased to private employers who used them in mines, manufactures, and mills, eventually to compensate for the severe shortage of labour due to the decline in the Indian population from the mid-sixteenth century. Particularly after Spain's losses to England during the Seven Years War (1756–1763), some hundreds of convicts – together with black slaves, their number progressively diminishing as that of convicts grew – were also involved in the fortification of Latin American ports such as Havana (Cuba) and San Juan (Puerto Rico). Havana served as the main hub for the New World presidios, and presidiarios came there from Mexico as well as from Spain. In Spain, following a system devised in the sixteenth century to supply convict rowers for the galleys, convicts awaited transportation to Spanish America in the central prisons of Toledo, Valladolid, and Seville and were shipped mainly through the port of Cadiz. Since they could be sent only on warships carrying troops, they often had to wait for years in the special depósito of La Carraca, subject to the informal practice, contrary to existing legislation, of exploiting the labour of convicts awaiting transportation.
In colonial settings, penal servitude was an integral part of a broader system of legal bondage that included slavery, serfdom, indentured service, and debt bondage, in which “unfree” labour played a fundamental role in the transition to “modernity”.Footnote 25 Between 1607 and 1775, 54,500 convicts from England, Wales, Ireland, and Scotland crossed the Atlantic Ocean to reach the shores of the British colonies in North America.Footnote 26 Together with more than 310,000 African slaves, around 200,000 British, Dutch, German, and French indentured workers and around the same number of free European migrants they formed the “many-headed hydra” of a nascent Atlantic working class that Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker have described in their volume of that title.Footnote 27 However, the independence of the American colonies deeply altered this trend. Already between 1776 and 1809, while 114,600 African slaves still reached North American shores, the number of free migrants along the same route rose to more than 250,000, while that of indentured servants and convicts dropped to 18,300 and 1,000 respectively. In the following decennium the transportation of convicts to North America virtually stopped, and the Australian continent became Britain's favoured penal destination.
In a new ideological climate that increasingly placed a premium on the ideal of “free labour”, religious and scientific motivations and the economic interests of a part of the elite produced the rise of the penitentiary in the north-eastern American states during the nineteenth century.Footnote 28 In the debate between the supporters of the Pennsylvania model (continuous isolation and work confined to single-prisoner cells) and those of the Auburn and Sing Sing models (night-time isolation and congregate silent labour in a factory-like setting), the arrangement and exploitation of prisoners’ work became absolutely central. By the 1850s all northern US state prisons had committed to the congregate system, which brought together the ideal of making the prisoner a “silent and insulated working machine”Footnote 29 and private capital's interests in the contract system, as opposed to the public account system dominating the Pennsylvania model. Moreover, workshop-based congregate labour proved a far more efficient deployment of penal labour, at least from capital's point of view, than the artisanal production required by the outmoded Pennsylvania system, which forced prisoners to work at handicrafts in isolation in their cells. In this emergent penal regime, the imperative of productive labour superseded the revolutionary era's ideals of punishment and penitence.
In various parts of the world, local elites eagerly demonstrated their commitment to “modernity” by replicating the debate on the Auburn and Philadelphia systems. Yet, the relationship between the American “model” and the new prisons created in subsequent decades cannot be conceived as one of mere transmission and reception.Footnote 30 In Europe, penal uses of convict labour continued to prevail over economic considerations.Footnote 31 Meanwhile, in the economic periphery and plantation societies, the abolition of slavery in the first half of the nineteenth century, colonial forms of government, and local dynamics strongly contributed to make race a fundamental factor in shaping peculiar and articulated regimes of punishment. These responded to the need to fix ethnically defined populations to specific territories and labour markets, including in the southern states of the US. In this context, convict labour, together with corporal punishment and the criminalization of entire populations, played a central role, since it translated both the racist assumption that the black/indigenous population would not work except under some form of compulsion and the idea of the insufficiency of imprisonment alone as a means to discipline subalterns, now often defined as inherently criminal.Footnote 32
The most recent literature has given plenty of evidence of this process.Footnote 33 For instance, scholars have described the nineteenth-century road-gangs in India, the industrial workshops in the Cairo Prison, and the “agricultural penitentiaries” in French north Africa and Italian Tripolitania; and they have narrated the exploitation of convict labour in Cecil Rhodes's De Beers Mining Company in Kimberley, South Africa's first industrial city, and the shibalo system through which Mozambican men and women escaping contract labour were forced to work for local public works and private enterprises and in the mines in South Africa, Rhodesia, and the Congo up to the 1940s. But researchers have observed similar patterns for highly racially segregated non-colonial contexts, such as post-independence Brazil and the American South after the Civil War and the abolition of slavery.
In all these cases, convict labour proved instrumental in matching the economic interests of local and colonial entrepreneurs and authorities with a persistent racial hierarchy and mentality. This process cut across both the private and public use of prison labour, and could involve both “excarceration” beyond penitentiary walls and incarceration. Not surprisingly, then, in the American South the phasing out of the excarcerative convict lease in the late nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth century did not lead to a reformed system of “modern” incarceration, mimicking the northern states, but rather to the states’ chain gangs. Convict labour was used then to build roads and other infrastructure or for state-controlled agricultural work, as in the infamous example of Parchman Farm in Mississippi, opened in 1904 and still notorious in the 1960s, when state authorities relied on the prison farm to break the will of the civil rights movement.
In the nineteenth century – allegedly “the age of the triumphant prison”Footnote 34 – and beyond, prison practice in most of the world therefore largely contradicted Michel Foucault's assumption of a sudden and definitive shift from corporal to disciplinary punishment, which in fact appears to be an artefact of a small corner of the emergent, modern, capitalist economies.Footnote 35 Moreover, even in these regions and states, the modern prison penitentiary coexisted with other forms of punishment. Convict labour, in the guise of both rehabilitation and punishment, remained a central feature of this more complex “coercive network”.Footnote 36 Indeed, within colonial empires, the rise of the prison did not negate the continuation and expansion of transportation, and often flourished alongside it.Footnote 37 Both in Britain and in France, attempts to replace transportation to far-flung corners of the empire with metropolitan imprisonment and hard labour were repeatedly made, but failed because of the systematic opposition of political and economic lobbies.Footnote 38 In the nineteenth century and part of the twentieth century, therefore, an “extensive pan-imperial trade” in penal labour developed.Footnote 39
In the case of Britain, this traffic responded to the new situation created by the independence of the American colonies, the abolition of slavery in the 1830s, and later by the rise of nationalist movements in the Indian subcontinent, all of which shifted imperial flows of coerced labour and settlement. Between 1787 and 1868, with the North American colonies now closed off, British authorities shipped some 160,000 prisoners from Britain to New South Wales, Van Diemen's Land, and Western Australia. From the late eighteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, many thousands more convicts were sentenced to transportation from British India to penal settlements in the Malay Peninsula, Burma, Mauritius, and the Andaman Islands. Minor convict migrant streams also appear significant in some specific periods and in relation to particular events: for instance, a few thousand were transported from Ceylon to Mauritius and south-east Asia (1815–1868); 300 or 400 non-Anglo-Celtic convicts were transported from Canada, the Cape, and the West Indies to New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land; 100 convicts were sentenced to transportation in Mauritius and sent to the Australian settlements (1825–1845); from the 1830s to the 1860s several thousand Chinese and Malay convicts from Burma were transported to the Bengal and Madras presidencies and to Bombay. For all the differences in these experiences, the operation of the penal settlements depended heavily on convicts’ productive capacities, and the governance of these settlements was organized around the transportation and labour that brought them into existence in the first place. To put it another way, an account of the imperial expansions of the nineteenth-century world remains incomplete without acknowledging the centrality of penal labour to this process, and penal transportation as a key aspect of imperial sovereignty.
In the case of the French Empire, the building of prison-manufactories – the maisons centrales, akin to the American penitentiaries observed by de Tocqueville and Beaumont in their 1831 visit to the US – in the period 1830–1835, where around 300,000 prisoners were held every year under terrible conditions, did not exclude the extensive use of alternative, excarcerative punitive practices. Following the abolition of slavery in the colonies (1848), the insurrections of 1848, and the expansion of its colonial empire, the French state (under imperial or republican governance in the metropole) resorted to transportation on a massive scale. A law passed on 30 May 1854 made Guyana the destination of both political and common-law bagnards; from 1861 New Caledonia was added as a place of transportation, for instance for those involved in the Commune, but in 1897 all deportees and releguées – petty criminals who could be transported under a law of 1885 – were transported again to Guyana. Transportation within the French Empire therefore began later than in the British case, but continued well into the twentieth century, longer than its counterpart. With deportation eventually abolished by the Front Populaire in 1938 and the last releguées returning to France in 1953, a total of nearly 100,000 men and women are believed to have been transported under French penal jurisdiction, 67,000 of them to Guyana (52,000 deportees and 15,000 releguées) and the rest to New Caledonia (20,000 and 10,000 respectively).
Similar patterns can be observed for the Portuguese Empire. After the independence of Brazil in 1822 a fundamental reorganization took place within its system of transportation. Convicts from Portugal, Cape Verde, Portuguese Guinea, São Tomé, and Mozambique were sent instead to the depósito in Luanda, Angola, and convicts from Angola, Portuguese India, Macau, and Timor to an analogous institution on Mozambique Island off the south-east coast of Africa. Around 20,000 convicts were exiled there from 1880 to 1932, when the system ended in Portuguese colonial Africa.
Because of their close association with deportations and the massive transfer of populations, it is tempting to interpret twentieth-century labour camps as the modern incarnation of these imperial systems of colonial transportation and punishment. We will discuss this point further in the following section. More commonly, however, research on labour camps has focused on their links with the shift to total war and with totalitarian regimes.Footnote 40 Naturally, World War II has been the single largest focus of research in this area, and wartime Japanese, German, and Soviet camps have attracted most scholarly attention. Japanese occupants deported 1 million Korean men and women and at least 40,000 Chinese to Japan, while forcing millions more civilians to work in Korea, China, and other parts of south-east Asia.Footnote 41 A relatively well-studied case is that of nearly 60,000 Allied POWs who were employed in the construction of the Siam–Burma Railway, interned together with 240,000 other POWs in more than 200 camps in different parts of occupied south-east Asia.
The literature on the Nazi system of camps is virtually unlimited. For the purpose of this article it will suffice to stress that, especially from the 1990s, scholars have pointed to some issues important for the understanding of convict labour as a key aspect of the Nazi regime, beyond the usual focus on war and genocide. Among these are the following. First, while also expanding our knowledge on Jewish and political internees and prisoners, scholars have devoted more attention to other groups, such as POWs, Roma, gays, and common-law prisoners.Footnote 42 Secondly, historians of Nazism have addressed the complexity of the network of camps for POWs, civilian internees, and prisoners, together with its transformation as dictated by military, political, and economic strategies during the brief life of the Nazi regime. Thirdly, we have seen a renewed focus on the question of the alleged contradiction between ideological and economic motivations in the creation of camps, pointing to the defining role of the process of “continuous selection and replacement”, based on the prisoner's ability to work, offset by both the nature of their work and by racial criteria.Footnote 43 Fourthly, there was the fate of the common-law prisoners forcibly put to work and the “annihilation through labour” programme.Footnote 44 Fifthly, mention should be made of the camps in the German African colonies as precedents and the fate of the colonial POWs.Footnote 45 Scholars have also turned their attention to the internment of ex-collaborationists after the end of the war.Footnote 46
Persistent interest in the history of totalitarianism, genocide, and the “Bloodlands” of east-central Europe has led as well to the significant expansion of research topics relating to the Soviet Gulags, especially as a system of labour “recruitment”, mobilization, circulation, and exploitation (though many of these studies extend both prior to and after the war).Footnote 47 Here, too, scholars have addressed the complexity of the Gulag system – 53 camps and 524 colonies in March 1941, on the eve of Soviet entry into the war – with some studies devoted to specific aspects, camps, and areas. The questions of the inmates’ productivity and of the contribution of the camp system to the economy of the USSR have also been investigated, showing how some strategic sectors particularly benefited from convict labour, especially during the phase of industrialization in the 1930s and in the labour mobilization during World War II. An emphasis on the “rehabilitative” function of forced labour was also characteristic of the Stalinist camps, as part of the broader ideological aim of “building the socialist man”. This holds true for other socialist countries as well.Footnote 48 For instance, administrative internment in Romania was mainly enforced for up to two years, but could be extended for five more years, according to the outcomes of the process of “re-education”, where work played a central role. In this context, convict labour was used mainly for public works, as in the case of the Donau–Black Sea canal, started in 1949 and finally inaugurated by Nicolae Ceauşescu in 1984.
An important case of the exploitation of convicts in labour camps constructed by a self-proclaimed “socialist” regime in the name of “re-education” can be found in post-1949 China.Footnote 49 As the studies of Frank Dikötter and Klaus Mühlhahn have shown, pre-communist China largely followed the path of other countries. Penal servitude, gaols, and traditional forms of punishment prevailed in the late imperial period and later overlapped with the emerging penitentiary model during the republican period. For instance, the Beijing No. 1 Prison, modelled after London's Pentonville (modelled, in turn, on the Pennsylvania system in the US), opened in 1912, with its workshops (carpentry, weaving, typesetting, printing and bookbinding, tailoring, stonemasonry, and work with metal, leather, and bamboo) indicating a strong emphasis on reformation. During the Republican era, support for labour camps remained limited to the pro-Soviet milieu. It gained ground only as a pragmatic response to the specific conditions of civil war, and subsequently spread both in communist- and in nationalist-controlled territory during the 1930s and early 1940s.
With the proclamation of the People's Republic in 1949, however, two distinct forms of punishment – and therefore two distinct institutional systems – developed, both emphasizing the role of labour in re-education: the laogai (an abbreviation for laodong gaizao, i.e. “reform through labour”), aiming at the birth of a “new man” through the remoulding of every aspect of a prisoner's morals, ideas, and habits, but under a determinate sentence; and the laojiao (an abbreviation for laodong jiaoyang suo, i.e. “re-education through labour”), instituted in the mid-1950s, allowing the legal system to be bypassed and local governments to remove “undesirable elements” through indeterminate sentences.
Whether under militarized fascist regimes, socialist states at war or peace, or seemingly more benign forms of governance, labour camps thus mark the modern world and reprise persistent linkages of state efforts to restrict or define the limits of citizenship, mete out punishment, and enforce work that date back to earlier historical periods.Footnote 50 Indeed, far from being limited to authoritarian or totalitarian regimes, administrative detention – often coupled with forced labour – has also characterized the recent history of many Western democracies. This was especially the case in colonial contexts, and the experience in Kenya is particularly telling, although not unique, in this respect.Footnote 51 As in other cases, conditions inside the detention camps created in Kenya in the 1910s and 1920s and in the prison camps opened in 1933 depended on the assumption that forced labour, together with corporal punishment, could actually serve as the only effective forms of penal discipline. However, the experience in Kenyan prisons and camps turned into an even more brutal experience by the end of 1954, at the zenith of the Mau Mau revolt, since police repression by far exceeded the capacity of the already overcrowded prisons, and the colonial government decided to establish a network of camps, collectively called the “Pipeline”, characterized by violence, torture, and forced labour.
More recent experiences within Europe itself indicate the actuality of detention camps and point to the centrality of convict labour within them. Particularly significant are the networks of “re-education camps” for asozialen or asocialen, which functioned respectively in West Germany and the Netherlands from the late 1940s to the 1970s.Footnote 52 More linked to the penal system, networks of detention camps for (mainly) alcoholics existed in Scandinavian countries up until the 1970s, with forced labour viewed as a central feature in the process of their “treatment”.Footnote 53 Moreover, it is tempting to see a historical continuity between these detention camps and some “therapeutic communities” created after the 1970s, for instance in Italy, conceived as an alternative to imprisonment for drug addicts convicted of minor crimes who are then forced to work without remuneration within factories inside the closed gates of the “community”.Footnote 54 In a perverse inversion of colonial transportation, the present-day global landscape is also dominated by the extensive network of “detention centres” for undocumented immigrants created since the early 1990s.Footnote 55 Little research has been carried out on his topic, and what has is qualitatively insufficient. The apparent marginality of forced labour in those institutions, mainly used as temporary warehouses for people awaiting expulsion and deportation, therefore needs to be systematically examined, not least because the camps are rapidly differentiating and growing in number.
Expanding Convict Labour Historiography
The survey in the previous section indicates the potentiality of a process-based approach to the history of convict labour and thus the need to overcome the present fragmentation of research into a number of sub-disciplines and geographic areas related to single regimes of punishment.Footnote 56 However, the survey also suggests the limitations of the available historiography on convict labour in at least two ways. On the one hand there exists a chronological limitation, especially as far as the pre-1500 period is concerned. On the other hand there is an undue focus in the historiography on a more or less explicit Eurocentric approach. Both of these limitations remain bound to the unwarranted teleology of penal reform and modernization that is assumed to move progressively towards stable forms of incarceration and rehabilitation, and away from brutality, unmitigated punishment, and naked coercion or enslavement. This view imagines the labour camps of totalitarian social orders as the negation of modernity. This section seeks to address these two issues, in order to put forward some suggestions for the development of a more global and long-term perspective on the history of convict labour, one less prone to reifying conceptions of punishment associated with “modernity”.
By extending our chronology back before 1500, two long-term trends can be observed. The first relates to the continuity or discontinuity of the experience of penal transportation.Footnote 57 The second refers to the “birth of the prison” as part of a broader shift in attitudes towards the socially marginal. Observing early modern and modern transportation, four conditions seem especially favourable for the development of penal transportation: first, centralized authority; secondly, control over large territories with an uneven distribution of resources; thirdly, a drive for (internal and/or external) colonization, often linked to military engagements; and, fourthly, fluidity between free and unfree labour. Notwithstanding the scarcity of sources and specific research, available studies on the Han Empire (206 BCE–220 CE) and on the (Western) Roman Empire (27 BCE–476 CE) reveal the consistency of these four characteristics with those ancient contexts as well.Footnote 58
In the Roman Empire the damnatio ad metalla led to the transportation of convicts (damnati, or damnati in metallum) to the gold and silver mines of Numidia, the alabaster mines and the porphyry quarries of Egypt, the marble quarries on the island of Proconnesus (Marmara), and other sites in Cyprus, Sardinia, and Palestine. In the Han Empire, convicts were transported to the government salt and iron monopolies, where they staged repeated revolts in the final part of the first century BCE. In both empires the employment of convict labour was linked with the trends in the demand and supply of slaves: in the case of the Roman Empire the rise of convict labour from the third century CE onward is probably due to the reduced influx of slaves, in turn possibly caused by the end of the wars of conquest; in the Han Empire of the second and first centuries BCE the “boundless supply of cheap corvee and convict labor”Footnote 59 appears to be a key explanation for the alleged absence of slaves in some economic sectors.
Moreover, the flexibility of labour relations has been especially stressed for the Roman Empire by ancient scholars who, moving away from its traditional characterization as a “slave society”, have pointed to the existence of a considerable degree of inter-changeability between the work of freemen, slaves, and freed slaves within what has been defined as a “unified labour force”.Footnote 60 Transported convicts could also be included in the latter. Central to this fluidity of labour relations was the “open” character of Roman slavery, marked by frequent manumissions, social mobility linked to positive incentives (salary, education, etc.), and the relatively high level of legal integration of ex-slaves into the citizenry. Similarly, the literature on the Han Empire refers to frequent general amnesties and special pardons for convicts of various classifications.
New research is certainly needed on this topic, together with greater cooperation between historians working on ancient and modern empires. However, it seems that a degree of continuity can be hypothesized between ancient, early modern, and nineteenth-century transportation. Furthermore, as suggested in the previous section, it is also tempting to propose that such continuity can be further traced between transportation and twentieth-century labour camps. Although the emphasis lies on the movement of inmates in the case of transportation, and on the locations of their final destinations in that of labour camps, transportation and camps can be seen as two different modes of a similar phenomenon of channelling and corralling the labour of subject or criminalized categories of the populace.Footnote 61 To begin with, the above four conditions apply to the twentieth-century camps too. Moreover, empirical evidence also points to this long-term continuity. For instance, agricultural penal colonies created outside Lisbon soon after the end of transportation to Portuguese Africa in 1932 were later used during the Salazar regime and, at least in the case of the Colónia Penal Agricola de “António Maceira” in Sintra, continue to function to this day.Footnote 62 Similarly, the long-term continuity between the Tsarist katorga and the Soviet Gulag can be understood in the context of Russian internal colonization of the eastern regions, especially once recent interpretations are taken into account that point to the deportation of millions of peasants to the “other archipelago” of the special settlements in the early 1930s.Footnote 63 This holds true as well for the network of Nazi concentration and labour camps.Footnote 64 In fact, deportation to Germany during World War II could be envisaged as an integrated system providing forced and convict labour from the Reich's annexed or controlled countries to specific sites in order to serve the needs of the Nazi war economy.
This long-term perspective on transportation also poses the question of the medieval experience of convict labour.Footnote 65 In fact, at least in the western European context, the Middle Ages witnessed the virtual disappearance of penal transportation. The four points mentioned above could suggest some explanations for this trend. With the reorientation of the Roman Empire towards the East, the European territory was essentially split into a series of political entities that were too many, too small, and too weak to conceive and organize the transportation of their small number of convicts. A “provincialization of politics” took place, since “local élites began to deal with the ‘barbarian’ powers rather than with the imperial government, which was by now too distant and decreasingly relevant”.Footnote 66 Moreover, the shift from taxation to landowning as the basis of the state made the post-Roman kingdoms economically less strong and less complex. The structure of the feudal economy further accentuated the fragmentation of power and territory and could be reckoned to have impeded the fluidity between different labour relations by tying surplus labour to particular plots of land. Finally, Germanic influences made weregild a prevalent form of punishment, focusing on compensation and restitution rather than transportation and forced labour.
Characteristic of the new situation in medieval Europe was also the recourse to exile rather than to transportation, that is, to a form of punishment aimed at expelling someone from a certain territory rather than sending them to another territory for forced work. Such expulsion sought primarily to cleanse and protect the body politic, rather than to deploy “surplus” population in an effort to extend the effective reach of the imperial state (though certainly these two motives could easily join together, as they came to in Britain's North American colonies). Lack of funding and facilities for long-term imprisonment can also be held responsible for this shift. Not surprisingly then, “the reappearance of penal labor in western Europe at the end of the Middle Ages coincided with the emergence of the national state and an increase in its wealth and power”.Footnote 67 The growing use of convict labour aboard the galleys in the same period confirms this, since it is first to be observed in larger and more powerful political entities such as Venice and France.
The late Middle Ages have also been seen as the origin of another long-term transformation in punishment and convict labour, one that in this case actually ran counter to the impulse to exile social malefactors. Around the thirteen century, the emergence of a new mode of production in some European urban centres and the general change in mentality led to a new attitude towards the governing of social outcasts – from expulsion to containment.Footnote 68 In turn, this produced the creation of new “incarcerative” institutions – leper-houses, brothels, hospitals, almshouses, Jewish quarters – and a fundamental shift in the practice of imprisonment. Gaols – the large majority of whose population was made up of individuals imprisoned for debt – took on a more important role in city life and the urban imaginary and became internally more differentiated. This meant that carceral institutions departed from their traditional role as warehouses for individuals awaiting trial or punishment. On this basis Guy Geltner has argued for a medieval “birth of the prison”, some five or six centuries before the chronology posed by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish.
To be sure, forced labour cannot be considered a major feature of these late medieval European prisons, but the shift in the attitude towards the socially excluded they suggested was a fundamental element in the emergence of other institutions explicitly designed to govern the urban poor and make them engage in productive or punitive labour. Examples of the latter are to be found especially in the prison workhouses – the Dutch tuchthuizen, the German zuchthäuser, and the English bridewells – that were created from the early seventeenth century.Footnote 69 As shown by the path-breaking research by Pieter Spierenburg, long-term shifts in mentalities and in material conditions played a role in making work a central feature of these institutions. Most importantly, the study of the workhouses leads to the following issues: the productive or non-productive character of convict labour (and the problem of its competition with free labour); the rehabilitative or punitive function of work; the specialization of space in the institutions and the differentiation within the inmate population, often through the gendered-, age-, and socially constructed concept of the “able-bodied” labourer. These questions, and the prison workhouse model as such, proved to be central in the rise of the penitentiary during the nineteenth century.Footnote 70
By examining the phenomenon of convict labour within a chronology going back before 1500, it is thus possible to address its role in the transition to modernity while at the same time avoiding a modernization-oriented approach that stresses a sudden transition accompanying the late eighteenth-century Industrial Revolution.Footnote 71 This approach entails a move away from teleological concepts such as “proto-industrialization” or “proletarianization” and frames convict labour as one form of labour relations involved in the process of commodification of labour. We have already explored this issue in the first section. What is important to add here is that, in order to proceed in this direction, a truly global perspective is needed, one that investigates the applicability of the scholarship on European medieval and early modern transportation, prisons, and workhouses described above to non-European experiences. For instance, what kind of punitive systems and convict labour were in use in the Abbassid, Mamluk, and Ottoman caliphates, in the Vijayanagara and Inca empires, and in the Aztec Triple Alliance?Footnote 72
Together with the fragmentation of sub-disciplines corresponding to regimes of punishment and temporal limitations imposed by teleological assumptions of modernity and progress, the limited knowledge of non-Western areas is the other fundamental limitation of the available literature on convict labour. Moreover, not only does the historiography focus more on “the West” than on “the Rest”, most of the research is marked by a Eurocentric mindset, one that takes the alleged progressive penal development of incarceration, rehabilitation, and social control associated with modernity as its template. This blind spot is in fact common to both the liberal humanitarian narrative and the critical anti-Enlightenment perspective, such as that provided by the Foucauldian approach to correctional history. Merely adding narratives of convict labour outside “the West” would then not be sufficient to move beyond this Eurocentric approach.Footnote 73 A non-Eurocentric understanding can emerge only when narratives, interpretations, and concepts are reconsidered from an integrated global perspective that no longer privileges the development of Western penal history, whether as a humane model or the poisoned taproot of total bio-power.
As with many other fields of research, colonial and post-colonial studies today represent the most innovative methodological sub-discipline within the historiography of convict labour. For although they too risk reproducing a form of Eurocentrism – the history of non-European countries considered only as far as European colonization is involved – the post-colonial awareness of the need to radically rethink Eurocentric categories allows us to reconsider convict labour within a global framework. Not surprisingly then, it is in a recent survey article on the “tensions of colonial punishment” that Taylor C. Sherman has proposed the concept of a “coercive network” as a new framework to understand the mutual connections between different regimes of punishment and the links between punishment as a whole and the political, cultural, social, economic, and administrative context on a global, or at least imperial, scale.Footnote 74 Similarly, Clare Anderson, writing on the convict transportation networks in the Indian Ocean across several centuries, has pointed to the need to develop a “world history frame sensitive to the global and the local”.Footnote 75
As should be evident by now, this article accepts these suggestions and in turn argues that they should be extended to the study of convict labour beyond the colonial and post-colonial experience. Our view is that convict labour can provide a strategic perspective to connect research on the intersecting lines of penal history and labour history from a global perspective, much the same way transnational studies of slavery and emancipation have helped reconceptualize the study of labour in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Atlantic world. When studying convict labour, one should neither remain trapped within preconceived “national” borders nor imagine the “local” as a self-contained unit and the “global” as a monolithic entity. Rather, following the work of Doreen Massey, space could be visualized as “the product of interrelations”, “the sphere of the possibility of the existence of multiplicity”, and as something “always under construction”.Footnote 76 It could then be possible to “follow the traces” of different persons, ideas, and phenomena through different localities and scales. For instance, historians of convict labour could study the exchanges of personnel, techniques, and technology, investigate global responses to specific events, trace the chains of production and consumption by convicts, compare the fate of different groups of prisoners, and follow the biographies of convicts, personnel, and other historical actors.Footnote 77 This is particularly true given how dependent penal networks and the political economy of convict labour have been on the movement of bodies through geographic space, the reallocation of human productive power from territory to territory, or from one economic sector to another, when the “market” would not suffice. This is why attention to transportation or “excarceration”, instead of incarceration alone, must be considered a central element in the history of convict labour.
Looking at convict labour beyond a rigid global/local dichotomy, the possibility also emerges to address fully human agency by a wide range of actors. In the past two decades scholars of penal history have paid significant attention to decision-making processes, interaction between various state and private authorities, and the plurality of consequences of attempts at reform. Efforts have also been made to locate the power to shape the policy of punishment and convict labour outside political and penal institutions, for example by the actions of convicts themselves, including resistance.Footnote 78 However, much work remains to be done in this field.
Only a handful of scattered studies, for instance, specifically deal with the key issue of the relationship between convict labour and the labour movement.Footnote 79 However, scholars have pointed to the importance of four aspects of this relationship: first, the “disciplining effect of convict labour” on free labour; secondly, the need to look at specific productive sectors when considering the issue of economic competition between convict and “free” labour; thirdly, the importance of labour organizations in limiting convict labour to state-owned sectors and, more often, to “domestic” labour inside penal establishments; and, fourthly, that the perceived “competition” of convict labour does not simply entail economic factors, but also relates to the negative image that convict labour could have shed on a particular class of people or on a certain location. In the latter case, opposition to convict labour could typically be expected from merchants and small entrepreneurs. On the other hand, at least in the recent history of the US, punishment has served as an engine of community economic redevelopment and job creation through “carceral Keynesianism” and in privatized corrections.Footnote 80
Other visible gaps in the historiography regard the custodians and the impact of imprisonment and exile on convicts’ families and friends.Footnote 81 More generally, little is known about the social history and work life of the inmates before and after their internment, a lack of information that is probably due to a long-term prejudice about – and the historical invisibility of – the lumpenproletariat that has formed the vast majority of the convict population in many contexts.Footnote 82 Furthermore, although quantitatively consistent for some places and periods, the literature on the labour of female convicts – around 5–10 per cent of prisoners in most societies – appears poorly integrated in general overviews of convict labour.Footnote 83 Scant attention is paid to the gender dimension of penal labour as such, as well as to the importance of age and generations. Particularly noticeable is the lack of specific studies on juvenile convict labour.Footnote 84
As far as the convicts’ agency is concerned, the picture remains highly uneven. Much historiography has focused on political convicts subjected to penal servitude and in prisons, where work has often played a highly particular role in regimes of punishment.Footnote 85 On non-political prisoners, important studies have been published on those transported across the Indian Ocean,Footnote 86 and on the individual and collective resistance of internees in the Nazi lagers and in the Stalinist Gulags (also in relation to forced labour),Footnote 87 but little is known about detention camps in other historical and geographical contexts. Similarly, much work has been done in recent decades on prisoner resistance to the convict lease and the chain gang in the US South in the second half of the nineteenth century, but no systematic study is available on resistance to forced labour in gaols, prisons, and penitentiaries.Footnote 88 Research on the latter could certainly benefit from an interdisciplinary approach that brings together historical findings and the long tradition of sociological, criminological, and ethnographical studies on life within “total institutions”.Footnote 89 And comparative research could reveal the role played by work and labour relations in common law prisoners’ rights movements, like those that erupted in the US and in western Europe during the 1960s and 1970s.Footnote 90
The lack of attention paid to agency also appears as the major weakness of the vast sociological and political literature on the process of mass incarceration in the US and elsewhere since the 1990s.Footnote 91 Here, abstract and supposedly non-modifiable forces such as “globalization”, “neoliberalism”, and (in the US) the “prison-industrial complex” are described as imposing control on the “post-industrial proletariat”, “multitudes”, and “poor” through incarceration. Although these descriptions have played an important role in creating awareness of the political relevance of this ongoing process, they fail to provide a broader framework to locate it historically. Moreover, because they do not always effectively identify specific agents that either promote or resist the shift in penal policy, these accounts can produce a sense of inevitability and thus impotence. Finally, this literature typically refers exclusively to Western penal systems – and most often to the US – but generalizes its conclusions to the whole world.
The same limitations characterize the way convict labour itself is approached in this strand of literature. Most frequently absent from the picture, it is otherwise depicted as an undifferentiated form of “modern slavery” in a way that suggests a regression to earlier stages of civilization. However, when contemporary convict labour is looked at through a global and comparative perspective the same intertwining of economic, social, political, and cultural factors appears that has operated in previous historical contexts.Footnote 92 Moreover, as in the past, convict labour in the contemporary world is not limited to penal institutions. Labour camps, in particular, continue to play an important role, as the Chinese laojiao and laogai dramatically show.
Yet today, even while incarceration expands as a form of punishment, penal labour itself often appears redundant. The complex interaction of different factors on different scales thus points to another possibility: the forces that have led to the emergence of convict labour in certain historical contexts could actually be reversed. An analysis is thus possible of the objective and subjective factors that have led away from the exploitation of penal labour in relation to certain categories of or even all prisoners in a given time and space. Under what conditions does punishment not produce rehabilitative or retributive convict labour? Why is there no convict labour? By answering these questions, dramatic human experiences may emerge, such as exile, repatriation, extreme isolation (as in US “supermax” prisons), extermination, and genocide or attempted genocide, not to mention the more mundane tasks of simply managing “surplus” populations in a post-industrial political economy.Footnote 93 But this approach might also reveal new patterns of agency, resistance, alternatives, and, perhaps, abolition.
