Anand Yang

Anand Yang (Grad ’76) published a new book, Empire of Convicts. The book focuses on male and female Indians incarcerated in Southeast Asia for criminal and political offenses committed in colonial South Asia. A major contribution to histories of crime and punishment, prisons, law, labor, transportation, migration, colonialism, and the Indian Ocean World, the book narrates the experiences of Indian convicts, and shows how they exercised agency in difficult situations, fashioning their own worlds and even becoming “their own warders.” Yang brings long journeys across the ocean to life in a deeply researched and engrossing account that moves fluidly between local and global contexts.