The last two decades have witnessed a surge of scholarly interest in penal labor in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century colonial world, especially the transportation of South Asian convicts, also known as bandwars, to British possessions in the Indian Ocean. Anand Yang adds to this burgeoning body of scholarship by reconstructing the lived experiences of Indian convicts carried to the British East India Company's establishments at Bengkulu in Sumatra and to Penang and Singapore—two of the three settlements (the other being Malacca) along the Malay Peninsula organized into the Straits Settlements in 1826. In addition to focusing on the lives of the mostly male convicts in each of these locations, Yang examines the extensive deliberations about the transportation and treatment of these prisoners with a view to expanding our understanding of the global history of coerced labor and the workings of British colonial and imperial governance.

Yang lays out the conceptual framework for this study in an introductory chapter, noting that a major concern is to relate the subjective experience of forced labor in exile and appreciate that a highly racialized ideology was central to understanding colonial practices and ideas about crime and the transportation of South Asian convicts. Chapter 2 focuses on the Indian convicts carried to Bengkulu from 1787 until an Anglo-Dutch treaty ceded the establishment to the Dutch in 1825. Chapter 3 examines bandwar life at Penang between 1790 and 1870, when convict labor was crucial to efforts to develop the island into a major regional commercial center. Chapter 4 spotlights the convict experience in Singapore, where convict labor was used more extensively and effectively than in any other of the Straits Settlements. An epilogue considers convict lives following the cessation of transportation to these settlements during the 1860s.

Yang's desire to expand our knowledge of the global history of coerced labor and the ways in which British colonial and imperial governance functioned is commendable, and to these ends, he engages in detailed reconstructions of the convict experience in each of these three settlements. Doing so permits him to shed considerable light on the life experiences of individual bandwars and the occasional political prisoners exiled to these settlements by British authorities, qualities that make his study a welcome addition to the small but expanding body of scholarship on subaltern biography in the Indian Ocean. His detailed, largely narrative account of colonial attitudes and policies toward these convicts underscores their important role in creating and maintaining the crucial infrastructure needed to establish British economic and political dominance in the Indian Ocean during the nineteenth century is also noteworthy.

Unfortunately, this attention to detail ultimately proves to be more of a bane than a boon because it tends to overwhelm readers, even those versed in Indian Ocean labor history. More importantly, this attention to detail obscures how and why the convict experience in Bengkulu, Penang, and Singapore speaks to larger issues in Indian Ocean and imperial history. Yang appears to be unaware of arguments that the use of transported Indian convict labor was bound up with the need not only to maintain law and order, and hence East India Company rule in its Indian territories, but also to ensure that the company's Southeast Asian possessions had adequate supplies of inexpensive labor at a time when the winds of abolitionism buffeted its Indian Ocean possessions. The convicts sent to Bengkulu in 1787, for example, arrived in the wake of a 1786 proposal, approved by the company's Court of Directors, to emancipate the settlement's slaves and turn them into free laborers and pepper farmers. Yang acknowledges that Indian convicts reached places such as Mauritius and the Andamans but provides no compelling sense of how or why the convict experience in Bengkulu, Penang, and Singapore was similar to or different from that in other British possessions. Fascinating observations, such as his brief mention that some of Penang's convicts became money lenders in later decades (p. 124), also remain unexplored. These shortcomings highlight that ensuring the historiographical significance of specialized case studies such as this rests on authors’ willingness to transcend the “tyranny of the particular” that plagues slave, convict, and indentured labor studies and situate the results of their research in more fully developed local, regional, pan-regional, and comparative contexts.