Global Convict Labour Studies in Global Social History Editor Marcel van der Linden (International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, The Netherlands) Editorial Board Sven Beckert (Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA) Philip Bonner (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa) Dirk Hoerder (University of Arizona, Phoenix, AR, USA) Chitra Joshi (Indraprastha College, Delhi University, India) Amarjit Kaur (University of New England, Armidale, Australia) Barbara Weinstein (New York University, New York, NY, USA) VOLUME 19 The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/sgsh Global Convict Labour Edited by Christian Giuseppe De Vito Alex Lichtenstein LEIDEN | BOSTON Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Global convict labour / edited by Christian Giuseppe De Vito, Alex Lichtenstein. pages cm. -- (Studies in global social history ; volume 19) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-28501-9 (hardback : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-90-04-28502-6 (e-book : alk. paper) 1. Convict labor--History. 2. Punishment--History. 3. Imperialism--History. I. De Vito, Christian G. II. Lichtenstein, Alexander C. HV8888.G56 2015 365’.6509--dc23 2015017738 This publication has been typeset in the multilingual “Brill” typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering Latin, ipa, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities. For more information, please www.brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 1874-6705 isbn 978-90-04-28501-9 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-28502-6 (e-book) Copyright 2015 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper. Contents Editors’ Preface vii List of Illustrations xviii List of Tables xix List of Contributors xx Writing a Global History of Convict Labour 1 Christian G. De Vito and Alex Lichtenstein PART 1 Genealogies of Convict Labour 1 Contextualising Condemnation to Hard Labour in the Roman Empire 49 Miriam J. Groen-Vallinga and Laurens E. Tacoma 2 Penal Enslavement in the Early Middle Ages 79 Alice Rio 3 Prison and Convict Labour in Early Modern Europe 108 Pieter Spierenburg 4 “ An Austrian Cayenne”: Convict Labour and Deportation in the Habsburg Empire of the Early Modern Period 126 Stephan Steiner 5 The Long View of Convict Labour in the Portuguese Empire, 1415–1932 144 Timothy J. Coates 6 Convict Labour Extraction and Transportation from Britain and Ireland, 1615–1870 168 Hamish Maxwell-Stewart vi Contents PART 2 Coloniality, Ethnicity, Racialism and Convict Labour 7 Labouring for the Raj: Convict Work Regimes in Colonial India, 1836–1939 199 David Arnold 8 The Relegation of Recidivists in French Guiana in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries 222 Jean-Lucien Sanchez 9 “… a Weapon of Immense Value”? Convict labour in British Colonial Africa, c. 1850–1950s 249 Stacey Hynd 10 Colonies of Settlement or Places of Banishment and Torment? Penal Colonies and Convict Labour in Latin America, c. 1800–1940 273 Ricardo D. Salvatore and Carlos Aguirre PART 3 Convict Labour and Governmentality 11 Gender and Convict Labour: The Italian Case in Global Context 313 Mary Gibson 12 Forced Labour in Nazi Concentration Camps 333 Marc Buggeln 13 Historicising the Gulag 361 Lynne Viola 14 “A Parade of Trick Horses”: Work and Physical Experience in the Political Prison 380 Padraic Kenney 15 Rethinking Working Class Struggle through the Lens of the Carceral State: Toward a Labour History of Inmates and Guards 400 Heather Ann Thompson Bibliography 439 Index of Places 490 <UN> Editors’ Preface Two prisoners…mime the digging of sand. …Their heads are shaven. It is an image of back-breaking and grotesquely futile labour. Each in turn fills a wheelbarrow and then with great effort pushes it to where the other man is digging, and empties it. As a result, the piles of sand never dimin- ish. Their labour is interminable. – Athol Fugard, stage directions, The Island1 At a recent performance of this play at Johannesburg’s Market theatre, the first ten minutes – a duet of grunts of literally backbreaking pain as each prisoner indeed mimed loading and pushing a wheelbarrow of heavy dirt around an other- wise empty stage only to dump it at his partner’s feet – produced an almost unbear- able tension. Here Fugard reveals the “bare life” of penal labour as torture, but not only as inflicted by the prison authorities, who in fact remain invisible throughout the play (and, in the climactic scene, are assumed to be embodied by the audi- ence). Instead, in an endless circular process, the pointless labour is reinforced by the inmates themselves. As Robben Island prisoner Neville Alexander (quoted by Padraic Kenney in his contribution to this volume) remarked about his own expe- rience of labour on “the Island,” “The pointlessness of the whole thing weighs heavily on the prisoners.”2 Fugard himself, in his notebooks, imagined Robben Island as a space defined by “Meaningless Absurd Labor. Punishment. Sisyphus.”3 Padraic Kenney’s essay on political imprisonment in this volume gestures towards this totalistic nexus of labour and punishment, reduced to its Sisyphean essence: “Torture, labour, and exercise: each activity approximated time itself in the prison. They offered an apparent respite from monotony, yet became monotony itself, confined in space and time.” With Fugard’s opening in mind, we might regard the experience of prison labour on Robben island as the apotheosis of this form of penality. But, as Kenney also asks in his medita- tion on the intersection of convict work and political identity: “is prison labour degrading, transformative, or punitive – or all three”? This volume of essays, growing from a two-day workshop held at the International Institute of Social History (iish) in Amsterdam in June 2012, provides the opportunity to explore multiple dimensions of convict labour across time, space, and varieties of state formation. The general aim of the 1 Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona, Statements (New York, 1986), 47. 2 Neville Alexander, Robben Island Dossier, 1964–1974 (Cape Town, 1994), 31. 3 Athol Fugard, Notebooks, 1960–1977 (New York, 1984), 212. viii Editors’ Preface conference was to bring scholars together in a common endeavor that would begin to develop a global and comparative history of convict labour across many of the regimes of punishment that have appeared from the 16th century to the present, including galleys, penal servitude, corvée, transportation, work- houses and factories, leased convict labour, chain gangs, concentration camps, political imprisonment directed at individuals, and state or military labour camps. As this ambitious list of topic suggests, forced labour has been an important component of penality in many eras, in diverse geographic locales, and in every type of state regime. Yet only rarely has it been considered in global, transnational, or comparative frameworks. With a few noticeable exceptions, scholars have tended to focus on the peculiarities of each regime of punishment; a series of independent sub-disciplines have thus emerged, e.g. the history of the penitentiary, of the Nazi concentration camps, or of transporta- tion to different destinations. The iish conference aimed to overcome this frag- mentation. By looking at convict labour as a common feature of diverse regimes of punishment across space and time, we sought to highlight their co-existence in specific periods and contexts, to stress the dynamic and interconnected nature of the various regimes of punishment, and to link their emergence and decline to particular moments in the evolution of the global political economy. Secondly, and perhaps somewhat less successfully, the conference attempted to overcome the Eurocentric and methodologically nationalist attitude of much of the general theories and historiographies of the relationship between punishment and society. In the opening bibliographic chapter, we attempt to rectify this in our synthesis of the existing literature on convict labour in an effort to provide “an itinerary through time, space, and different regimes of punishment.” In doing so, we question 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” entailed by a blinkered focus on European penal developments. Moreover, those develop- ments themselves proved deeply enmeshed with a global history in which Europe was but one player. Accordingly, we asked participants, even (or espe- cially) those still working within the boundaries of the nation-state, to keep in mind comparative and entangled histories, trans-national and trans-local con- nections, even while they highlighted the distinctive nature of the national or typological form of convict labour in their area of expertise. To this end, we arranged the conference itself – and the papers that follow in this volume – around three broad thematic approaches to these problems. First, in an effort to understand the deep historical linkages between punish- ment and work in myriad social contexts, we asked some scholars to address <UN> Editors’ Preface ix the “genealogy” of convict labour. Simply put, we wanted to explore how, when, and why particular states and/or political authorities chose to make forced labour part of a penal regime. In many cases, this was closely linked to state formation, imperial expansion, or the projection of military power.