The pre-frontal cortex: links between neuropsychological performance and the sleep and wake EEG

The Pre-Frontal Cortex (PFC) has one of the highest Cerebral Metabolic Rates (CMR) during wakefulness (Braun et al., 1997, Maquet et al., 1990) and the lowest CMR during Slow Wave Sleep (SWS) at night (Maquet, 2000) .Inasmuch that the PFC is a focus for low frequency delta activity (e g. Werth et al., 1996, 1997), generated directly by the cortex (Steriade et al., 1993a-c), it is argued, here, that this serves a localised function of sleep and is thus reflective of enhanced recovery. Given the PFC-delta activity link, Clark et al. (1998) assessed daytime regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) and found increased 'brainwork' during the day resulted in increased delta activity at night, specifically in the (left) PFC. [Continues.

Empire, boundaries, and bodies : colonial tattooing practices

In recent years the body has become a fashionable mode of enquiry into the nature of colonial societies. Historians have used a Foucauldian or Saidian framework to focus on the relationship between power and the body (notably within colonial institutions, but also those embodied in cultural practices), and/or on representations of the body (for instance in ethnographies of colonial difference). As Abby Schrader puts it, ‘the body itself constitutes a central text of cultural history’. India and Africa in particular have proved fertile ground for explorations of the colonial body, for it was peculiarly central to colonial understandings of societies in which the organizing principles of caste and tribe – with their seemingly incomprehensible array of ritual practices and taboos – seemed so important. In examining colonial tattooing practices and their representations, this chapter draws upon this empirically and theoretically pertinent set of historiography. It presupposes the surface of the skin – and its apparently permanent and always potentially visible inscriptions – as an important element of the embodied practices and representations that historians and anthropologists have described

Introduction: A Global History of Convicts and Penal Colonies

[First paragraph] In 1415, the Portuguese Empire used convicts as part of an expeditionary force sent to conquer the Moroccan presidio (fort) of Ceuta in North Africa. This marked the first known use of condemned criminals by a European power in an expansionary imperial project. Numerous other global powers emulated the Portuguese example in the years, decades and centuries that followed. The Spanish, Dutch, Scandinavians, British, French, Japanese, Chinese, Russians and Soviets all transported convicts over large distances of land or sea; as did the independent states of Latin America, including Cuba, Mexico, Ecuador, Brazil and Argentina. Transportation was a means of punishment, deterrence, and population management and, through the expropriation of convict labour, of occupying and settling distant frontiers. Convicts travelled multi-directionally, shipped outwards from Europe and other metropolitan centres, within nations, and between colonies and the so-called peripheries of empires and polities. Excepting Antarctica, its extent touched every continent of the globe

The power of words in nineteenth-century jails : British colonial Mauritius, 1835 - 87

In this chapter, I explore speech and writing in British colonial prisons, to focus on how officials and prisoners used spoken words and written texts in particular ways, for particular purposes and with particular effects. I begin with a discussion of a major report on prison discipline in the colonies, which made a series of wide-ranging geographical investigations into thirty-three colonies across North America, the Caribbean, Africa, Australia and the Indian Ocean, 1864-5. But the main focus of the pages that follow is Mauritius, for its jails were especially interesting during this period. The colony had been undergoing rapid social and demographic change since the abolition of slavery and the successor apprenticeship system, in 1835 and 1839 respectively, and planters introduced Indian and Chinese labourers under contracts of indenture to replace slaves on the sugar plantations. Gradually, Indians began to overtake slaves, ex-slaves and their descendents as the majority population, so that by 1871 they constituted more than two-thirds of the population. Of further relevance is the island’s history as a French colony captured by the British during the Napoleonic Wars, in 1810. Jails were spaces that reflected this history and demography, and in which people from diverse places and cultures, and speaking different languages, came together in close proximity

The Ferringees are flying - the ship is ours!': The convict middle passage in colonial South and Southeast Asia, 1790-1860

This article is part of a broader project that seeks to 'read against the grain' in reconstructing the experiences of convicts transported overseas to prisons and penal settlements in South and Southeast Asia during the nineteenth century. In many ways, convict ships are empty archival spaces. Colonial officials recorded their departure and arrival, and enumerated and described the convicts on board, often in meticulous detail. However, the limitations of these records make the experiences of convict men and women on board transportation vessels more difficult to access. This article will attempt to do so through an analysis of convict ship mutinies. From the 1830s there were more than a dozen incidents in which convicts rose against their captains and made a bid for freedom. These mutinies were transgressive acts that reveal much about convict journeys into transportation: the limitations of colonial regulation of convict vessels, conditions on board ship, and the alliances forged between convicts and crew. They also reveal the multidimensional nature of the convict middle passage, and dispel simplistic notions of single convict identities and experiences

The Execution of Rughobursing: The Political Economy of Convict Transportation and Penal Labour in Early Colonial Mauritius

The Execution of Rughobursing: The Political Economy of Convict Transportation and Penal Labour in Early Colonial Mauritiu

The British Indian Empire, 1789-1939

[First paragraph] Between 1789 and 1939 the British transported at least 108,000 Indian, Burmese, Malay and Chinese convicts to penal settlements around the Bay of Bengal and Indian Ocean, and to prisons in the south and west of mainland India. The large majority of these convicts were men; and most had been convicted of serious crimes, including murder, gang robbery, rebellion and violent offences against property. In each location, convicts constituted a highly mobile workforce that was vital to British imperial ambitions. The British exploited their labour in land clearance, infrastructural development, mining, agriculture and cultivation. They also used them to establish villages and to settle land. Asian convicts responded to their transportation in remarkable ways. They resisted their forced removal from home, led violent uprisings and refused to work. They struck up social and economic relationships with each other, and with people outside the penal settlements. They joined cosmopolitan communities or helped to forge new syncretic societies. If ‘creolization’ and ‘coolitude’ capture conceptually the interactions and culture and identity outcomes of enslaved and indentured people in the Indian Ocean world, ‘convitude’ might do the same work for the experiences of transported Asian convicts

Fashioning Identities : Convict dress in colonial south and Southeast Asia

This article explores the issue of clothing in India's penal settlements. From the late eighteenth to the mid twentieth centuries, the British transported tens of thousands of Indian convicts overseas to penal settlements in Southeast Asia, Mauritius and the Andaman Islands. Removed from their supposedly criminal networks and put to work, convict offenders were apparently rehabilitated whilst conveniently satisfying colonial labour demands. The organization of the penal settlements relied on a division of convicts. According to skills, behaviour and proportion of sentence served, convicts could rise through the ranks of the penal hierarchy and be transferred from hard labour to preferred work tasks or positions of authority over their fellow countrymen and women. The most immediately visible marker of convict status was dress. By the mid nineteenth century, a complex system of uniform clothing had evolved, delineating how long convicts had been in the penal settlements and how they were employed there; later, clothing was further adapted to indicate categories of crime. Initially, the evolution of convict dress was informed by developments in the Australian penal settlements. Later, and more significantly, initiatives on prison dress in India became important. However, as we shall see, the development of penal clothing in the Indian convict settlements overseas also had an agenda of its own. [Taken from introduction

Godna : inscribing Indian convicts in the nineteenth century

Tattooing in Asia has a long history. In the fifteenth century, the traveller Nicolo Conti recorded how inhabitants of the Irawadi Valley (Burma) ‘puncture their flesh with pins of iron, and rub into these punctures pigments which cannot be obliterated.’ A century later, Tavernier wrote that the women of Banjera (East Bengal) tattooed their skin ‘in such a manner to appear as though the skin was a flowered fabric.’ The origins and meanings of such tattooing, commonly known as godna (or godena) are both obscure and diverse. Decorative tattooing amongst the indigenous, tribal (adivasi) populations of the Indian subcontinent has existed for centuries. Nomadic communities tattooed themselves as a mark of identity, assuring their recognition as they wandered from place to place. Nineenth-century anthropologists detailed how tribal gond women, for example, patterned their legs with a variety of symmetrical tattoos in indigo or gunpowder blue. Designs were said to include animals such as tigers, monkeys and birds, which had totemistic connotations. Banjara (traders) and gadia lohar (ironsmiths) in Rajasthan wore a particular design on the face. Marking the body was also said to be a sign of ritual status. Among the tribalabors of Assam, the presence of a tattoo was necessary to marry. The absence of tattoos on young Burmans’ thighs was emasculating. Male dhangars, an adiviasi group from the Central Provinces, branded - rather than tattooed - five marks on the lower arm with a hot iron, as a sign of initiation to manhood. Tattooing and branding were also used as a curative for physical ailments. Some communities branded themselves with burning wood, in the belief that it would make their joints supple. [Opening paragraph

After emancipation : empires and imperial formations

This essay will explore the relationship between enslavement, emancipation and the larger labour history of the British imperial world. Drawing on my area of specialism – convict transportation in the Indian Ocean world - I will suggest that slavery was part of a continuum of unfree work practices that spanned Empire, and that Empire’s variously staggered emancipations were moments that laid the ground for the production of new coerced labour forms. Enslavement, emancipation, coercion and work: each was connected to the other, and together they underpinned the making and remaking of the British Empire and its associated imperial formations. Slavery and other forms of colonial labour came together through practices and understandings that connected work with the search for imperial dominance and profit, as well as understandings about the relationship between race, ethnicity, class and labour. Over time, as I will show, the articulations and and re-articulations of colonial ideas about difference and distinction produced new forms of geographic and social dislocation and exploitation, as well as a host of imaginative connections between people, work and political economy