Show notes
Hamish Maxwell-Stewart and Michael Quinlan’s Unfree Workers: Insubordination and Resistance in Convict Australia, 1788–1860(draws
on considerable Australian legal, archival and statistical sources to
ensure that we not only see the management of unfree labour regimes
deployed in settler colonies, but also to identify all the strategies
that victims of the early imperial prison-industrial complex used to
resist the regime.
The first half of Unfree Workers
provides a brilliant account of the diversity of coercive labour
practices that were demanded under colonial and settler-colonial
expansions. Their labour regime was incredibly violent:
A sentence to penal transportation was no trivial thing. The convicts
sent to New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land were regimented,
disciplined and accounted for in ways that pre-empted later social
controls. They were also subjected to high levels of state sanctioned
violence. The punishments and conditions of work they experienced
continued to shape their lives long after they became free, impacting on
colonial family formation and life expectancy.
Maxwell-Stewart and Quinlan show the material links between violence
and colonial economic necessity. Unfree workers whose skills did not
match those in demand were more likely to be accused of work refusal,
which put them at risk of demotion to harder labour and increased
violence.
Maxwell-Stewart and Quinlan’s Unfree Workers, reminding us that while colonial capitalism is a system of exploitation, it necessarily depends upon class conflict.
The process of transportation was a site for resistance. The convict
ship, like the slave ship, was a factory that produced commodified
labour for the colonies, ‘converting the idle poor into docile
labourers.’ Mutiny offered convicts the opportunity to steal their
prison and use it for emancipatory means. Though many conspired, few
succeeded, but on-ship radicalisation nevertheless prepared convicts for
resistance on land. This included making deals for improved working
conditions (including sometimes wages) in exchange for industrious and
non-violent work. To this end, imprisoned workers came together in
common cause, conducting strikes and go-slows and withholding effort.
Just as Caribbean plantations were sites of frequent slave uprising,
Maxwell-Stewart and Quinlan show, so too were convict workers also
legitimately feared for their capacity for violent rebellion, sometimes
with potential support from settlers with wider political goals.
Van Diemen’s Land’s extraordinary record-keeping—itself an instrument
of the punitive surveillance characteristic of the prison-industrial
complex—means that Maxwell-Stewart and Quinlan have recounted in
meticulous, often mapped, detail the size, activity and consequences of
collective action among unfree workers.
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