Unfree Workers

Hamish Maxwell-Stewart is a professor of heritage and digital history at the University of New England, Australia. He has researched and published extensively on the history of convict transportation including its connections with slavery and other unfree labour systems.Michael Quinlan is emeritus professor of industrial relations at UNSW, Australia, as well as holding posts at the University of Tasmania, Australia, and Middlesex University, UK. He has researched and published extensively on the history and regulation of work (including occupational health and safety) and worker organisation.

“Unfree Workers draws out the implications of recent convict historiography, built on the foundations of the influential project to understand convicts as workers. … this is a significant intervention in convict studies with wider implications. Unfree Workers connects convict Australia to a bigger story of imperial capitalism and the exploitation of land and labour. The unique richness of the convict archive made this book possible … .” (Matthew Allen, The Great Circle, Vol. 46 (2), 2024)

• Section 1: Incarceration—Convicts, unfree labour and colonial capitalism.- Chapter 1: Unfree labour, Dissent, Convict-transportation and the building of colonial capital.- Chapter 2: Approaches, Sources and Methods.- Chapter 3: Convict Eastern Australia: Labour Bureaucracy or Police State?.- Chapter 4: Battling the Bench.- Section 2: Excarceration—Patterns of resistance and collective action.- Chapter 5: Shipboard mutinies.- Chapter 6: Issuing Demands, Appeals and Threats.- Chapter 7: Go-slows, Strikes and Effort Bargaining.- Chapter 8: Absenteeism, Absconding and Escape.- Chapter 9: Sabotage, Assault and Theft.- Chapter 10: Riots, Bushranging and Revolt.- Chapter 11: Nothing to lose but their chains?.