"Subaltern Lives uses biographical fragments of the lives of convicts, captives, sailors, slaves, indentured labourers and indigenous peoples to build a fascinating new picture of colonial life in the nineteenth-century Indian Ocean. Moving between India, Africa, Mauritius, Burm…
From the publisher. Since Robert Hughes' The Fatal Shore, the fate of British convicts has burned brightly in the popular imagination. Incredibly, their larger story is even more dramatic -- the saga of forgotten men and women scattered to the farthest corners of the British emp…
"No matter where in Canada they occur, inquiries and inquests into untimely Indigenous deaths in state custody often tell the same story. Repeating details of fatty livers, mental illness, alcoholic belligerence, and a mysterious incapacity to cope with modern life, the legal pr…