Hamish Maxwell-Stewart and Michael Quinlan, "Unfree Workers: Insubordination and Resistance in Convict Australia, 1788–1860" (Springer Nature, 2022)

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,