Gender, Disability, Aging, and Labor: Indian Convicts in Singapore, Penang, and Melaka

Abstract Many scholars have noted the incessant demands of British India’s penal colonies for “able-bodied men.” But historians have primarily interpreted these requests as evidence of the significance of convict labor to the making of British colonies in the Indian Ocean and Asia. Instead, I explore how interlinked concepts of gender, ability, and age shaped labor practices in the Straits Settlements from the 1820s until the 1870s. In particular, I examine a single penal category that conflated the bodies of women with those of elderly and disabled men: the sixth class of “[f]emales, invalids and superannuated convicts.” I read the sixth class of convicts as a category that: transed gender by mingling male and female bodies; demarcated ostensibly useful and useless bodies; had ambiguous caste implications; simultaneously created openings for, and obfuscated, convict resistance; and produced contradictory narratives of old age. This “minor history” of convict transportation highlights that if we are to understand global histories of labor, we need to analyze the contingent relationship between aging, disability, and gender.