The publication of Ronit Ricci's edited collection, Exile in colonial Asia: Kings, convicts, commemoration is an important event for the field. This volume, made up of ten contributions with an introductory essay also offered by the author, covers ground that we have not seen before in the region. Though there has been some work on the notion of exile in this part of the world — notably on the exile of officials in classical China, for example, but also, increasingly, in colonial Southeast Asia, as practised by European overlords on their subject, indigenous populations — the idea of charting this process as a whole across the width and breadth of Asian space is new, to my knowledge. As such, this is a signal work — one that will hopefully inform others, and start a raft of publishing on similar topics. We could use the book. Exile was a powerful tool, both for local governments punishing their own subjects, and for imperial governments keen to move ‘troublemakers’ and ‘rabble-rousers’ away from their ethnic fellows, and out toward ‘safer’ pastures. This volume covers a wide range of exiling in history, and the first essay by Ronit Ricci herself, and a second contribution by Clare Anderson, which also looks at the theme over the two centuries from 1700 to 1900, both chart useful directions. This is very important in a path-breaking work of collaborative scholarship such as this one.

In dealing with a topic as large and unwieldy as this, it is not easy to find patterns to organise essays so that they make sense as a collectivity. But there are strands of continuity that appear in the warp and weft of the book. Robert Aldrich's piece on the exile of the last king of Kandy, for example, dovetails with Ronit Ricci's own piece on the connections between Java and Jaffna, for example, centring Sri Lanka in the frame of the volume. This is instructive, as that island is normally given second-billing to India in much Indian Ocean scholarship, outside the realm of Buddhist networks, where it does have a certain primacy. Similarly, Lorraine Paterson's piece on exile from colonial Indochina (to places as far away as New Caledonia, and even French Guyana in South America) has a resonance with Penny Edwards’ work on Prince Myngoon of Burma, who the British saw to be equally troublesome as their Gallic contemporaries across the Southeast Asian mainland, and further east. Timo Kaartinen's essay on exile in far eastern Indonesia jibes too with Carol Liston's piece on the convict experience in New South Wales, Australia, as we get to the bottom corners of the map of Asia as we know it. There are also resonances between Anand Yang's work on Bahai Maharaj Singh in Singapore and Sri Mareana's on the exile of Sultan Hamengkubawana II of Yogyakarta, in central Java, as both of these pieces focus less on place, and more on individuals, as a kind of historical story-telling. The pairings above show the various choices that a range of ten authors could make on how to treat the topic of exile in multifaceted ways.

Yet what really keeps this volume coherent for me is the confluence of two ideas; power and geography. To have power in the ‘colonial Asia’ of the book's title, one had to control geography. And there was no more potent control over geography than the power to exile one's subject or citizen from one place in Asia to another (or, as was the case with Shaykh Yusuf of Makassar in the seventeenth century, outside it altogether). This central fact connected administrations and regimes of various imperial colourings, and shared a common understanding of removing ‘the cancer’ of individual dissent as a tool of the state.

And many states indeed used this tool at their disposal. We see this in Jean Gelman Taylor's wonderful piece on the Cape of Good Hope, which from the ‘contact age’ onward became such a space, a receptacle in some ways for those in Asia who could not or would not be assimilated to evolving coercive politics on the ground. But we also see this pattern through the nineteenth century, and into the twentieth, as the powers of the imperial state became greater and greater over time. Exile was used as a continual lever of power throughout these centuries, from the dawn of the imperial age to the time of its emerging denouement, roughly one hundred years ago. Taking into account the vast geography on show here, as well as the temporal breadth of four centuries, this is a signal achievement. Exile in colonial Asia allows us to see patterns in these processes where before there were none. This is a real achievement for an edited volume, composed of nearly a dozen authors, and for this reason if no other, this book should be widely assigned and read across the curriculum.