This is not the story of the Honourable East India Company, about which much has already been written, although it has to do with the East India Co, and in particular with one of their more humble servants. It is the story of a remote outpost of empire in the 1820s, told by a young Eurasian in the long letters home to his father in England. William Grant Day was educated in England and then sent back to Sumatra with his brother, Tom, to look after his father's spice plantation. In his letters home William writes of the day to day life in the fever ridden settlement of the Company's station at Fort Marlborough (Bencoolen); of the slaves working the plantation; of the opium trade; of the bickering and morals in the small European community; of death and disease and duelling; of Sir Stamford Raffles, the founder of Singapore; of loneliness and boredom and Dutch intolerance; and through it all the insecurity of life and the humdrum business of running a spice plantation. Perhaps also we can read between the lines a little and feel what it must have been like to have been an educated Eurasian in an outpost of Empire.

Empire of Convicts focuses on male and female Indians incarcerated in Southeast Asia for criminal and political offenses committed in colonial South Asia. From the seventeenth century onward, penal transportation was a key strategy of British imperial rule, exemplified by deportations first to the Americas and later to Australia. Case studies from the insular prisons of Bengkulu, Penang, and Singapore illuminate another carceral regime in the Indian Ocean World that brought South Asia and Southeast Asia together through a global system of forced migration and coerced labor. A major contribution to histories of crime and punishment, prisons, law, labor, transportation, migration, colonialism, and the Indian Ocean World, Empire of Convicts narrates the experiences of Indian bandwars (convicts) and shows how they exercised agency in difficult situations, fashioning their own worlds and even becoming “their own warders.” Anand A. Yang brings long journeys across kala pani (black waters) to life in a deeply researched and engrossing account that moves fluidly between local and global contexts.

This book — written by Dr John Bastin, a leading authority on the study of Sir Stamford Raffles — offers an alternative biographical account of Raffles, as seen through his relationship with some of his closest friends and contemporaries.The people featured include the naturalists Joseph Arnold, Thomas Horsfield and Nathaniel Wallich, who received support from Raffles in carrying on their scientific research, and the orientalist John Leyden, who influenced Raffles's study of Malay and Malay customs.Examining Raffles and his social circle presents an original perspective of the man and of the colonial world in which he lived, and his correspondence with his friends and scientific colleagues reflects his attitude and opinions on a range of issues, including his desire to extend the benefits of education. The book is a highly original contribution to the study of Raffles in the bicentenary year of his founding of Singapore.