University of Leicester historian celebrates double book prize win
Clare Anderson, Professor of History and Director of the Leicester Institute for Advanced Studies, has won the Social History Society Book Prize 2024 and the Australian Historical Association’s biennial Kay Daniels Award 2024, for her book Convicts: A Global History.
Convicts: A Global History takes a global history perspective, showing connections and relationships within and between penal colonies, empires and polities, and showing how global history can be written as history from below.
The Social History Book Prize recognises innovative scholarship in the fields of social and cultural history. Speaking about the book, at the presentation ceremony on 8 July, the judges said:
“An impressive, original, accessibly written, genuinely global history based on exceptionally wide-ranging international research covering more than five centuries. It transforms the histories of imprisonment and punishment for crime, demonstrating how convicts were used as agents of colonization, occupation and frontier expansion, helping to build and expand empires, and contributing to challenges to empire.
“Anderson describes how observation of convicts helped extend scientific knowledge including of medicine and influenced theories of race and heredity and much more.”
A few days earlier, on 4 July, Professor Anderson also won the Australian Historical Association’s biennial Kay Daniels Award 2024, which recognises outstanding original research with a bearing on Australian convict history and heritage including in its international context.
Judges commented on the book, saying “it is a tour de force in convict scholarship. With an exceptionally broad scope spanning more than five hundred years, Anderson’s meticulously researched work provides an authoritative global and comparative examination of ‘punitive mobility’ and penal transportation.
“Drawing from a wealth of primary sources across international archives, her analysis deftly weaves together diverse perspectives from high-level policymakers to convict letter writers and their families. Convicts: A Global History redefines our understanding of colonial convict histories on a global scale.”
Celebrating these successes, Professor Anderson said: “I am thrilled and grateful to the Social History Society and Australian Historical Society for honouring my work.
“In my book, I try to balance big histories of mobility, punishment, labour, exploration, science, and medicine with convict-centred perspectives. One of the great ironies of state-directed convict systems is that, especially since the 19th century, they produced extraordinarily detailed archives.
“I wanted to piece these together and see if I could trace patterns across time and contexts. When I started my research, I was primarily thinking about convicts as workers, but as I started to write the book, I began to realise that convicts played a vital role in imperial projects of expropriation, dispossession, expansion, science, and medicine.
“I was surprised at how tenaciously the global powers clung to different forms of punitive mobility, and this led me to question dominant narratives of the so-called rise of the prison. More broadly, this book project has reminded me, time and again, to question the passive tense that we often find in records of empires.
“This simple shift in focus enabled me to reveal convicts as active historical subjects in the making of the modern world, whilst they resisted their oppression at every turn.”
Convicts: A Global History takes a global history perspective, showing connections and relationships within and between penal colonies, empires and polities, and showing how global history can be written as history from below.
The Social History Book Prize recognises innovative scholarship in the fields of social and cultural history. Speaking about the book, at the presentation ceremony on 8 July, the judges said:
“An impressive, original, accessibly written, genuinely global history based on exceptionally wide-ranging international research covering more than five centuries. It transforms the histories of imprisonment and punishment for crime, demonstrating how convicts were used as agents of colonization, occupation and frontier expansion, helping to build and expand empires, and contributing to challenges to empire.
“Anderson describes how observation of convicts helped extend scientific knowledge including of medicine and influenced theories of race and heredity and much more.”
A few days earlier, on 4 July, Professor Anderson also won the Australian Historical Association’s biennial Kay Daniels Award 2024, which recognises outstanding original research with a bearing on Australian convict history and heritage including in its international context.
Judges commented on the book, saying “it is a tour de force in convict scholarship. With an exceptionally broad scope spanning more than five hundred years, Anderson’s meticulously researched work provides an authoritative global and comparative examination of ‘punitive mobility’ and penal transportation.
“Drawing from a wealth of primary sources across international archives, her analysis deftly weaves together diverse perspectives from high-level policymakers to convict letter writers and their families. Convicts: A Global History redefines our understanding of colonial convict histories on a global scale.”
Celebrating these successes, Professor Anderson said: “I am thrilled and grateful to the Social History Society and Australian Historical Society for honouring my work.
“In my book, I try to balance big histories of mobility, punishment, labour, exploration, science, and medicine with convict-centred perspectives. One of the great ironies of state-directed convict systems is that, especially since the 19th century, they produced extraordinarily detailed archives.
“I wanted to piece these together and see if I could trace patterns across time and contexts. When I started my research, I was primarily thinking about convicts as workers, but as I started to write the book, I began to realise that convicts played a vital role in imperial projects of expropriation, dispossession, expansion, science, and medicine.
“I was surprised at how tenaciously the global powers clung to different forms of punitive mobility, and this led me to question dominant narratives of the so-called rise of the prison. More broadly, this book project has reminded me, time and again, to question the passive tense that we often find in records of empires.
“This simple shift in focus enabled me to reveal convicts as active historical subjects in the making of the modern world, whilst they resisted their oppression at every turn.”