The study of labour as an integral element of empire is frequently underrepresented in academic literature. Labour is an integral element in fueling colonial capitalist enterprise and oftentimes enlightens the reader on the fabrics of how an imperial power was supported. The third chapter of Shu-Mei Huang and Hyun Kyung Lee’s work, Heritage, Memory and Punishment: Remembering Colonial Prisons in East Asia, engages with the experiences of Korean, Chinese and Taiwanese penal labourers under Japanese colonial rule between 1895 and 1945.¹ It highlights the gruelling experiences of Korean and Taiwanese penal labourers, the conditions they endured, the work they were forced to conduct and the Japanese structures and rhetoric that supported the system. An enlightening aspect of Lee and Huang’s chapter is their argument regarding Japan’s desire to demonstrate its modernity to western powers by mimicking western practices of punishment. The intense study of western penal systems led Japanese penal institutions to emulate those practices in their penal settlements to expand their imperial holdings and demonstrate their modernity.² I argue that efforts to mimic the west are most visible when comparing the rhetoric and conditions of penal labour usage of Korean penal labourers in Japanese colonies and South Asian penal labourers in British Southeast Asian colonies. Both structures, which were prevalent less than a century apart, hold distinct similarities that demonstrate the origins behind Japanese structures of correction.

Lee and Huang highlight how justifications for the use of Korean penal labour was to reform the prisoner through labour. The Japanese were endeavouring on a moral mission to change the attitudes of the prisoner and convert them to become ‘dutiful subjects of the Japanese emperor’.³ The rhetoric demonstrates how Japanese officials self-identified as their subjects’ moral educators and reformers. These justifications are quite similar to Indian experiences in Penang, Malacca and Singapore as John McNair, a former superintendent of convicts highlights how the use of convict labourers was so they ‘become useful members of society, and free themselves from the disabilities under which they labour’.⁴ From McNair’s account, he viewed himself as integral to the moralising mission of ‘reforming’ the convicts he supervised and making them into ‘useful members of society.⁵ Written in 1899, McNair’s accounts were logged not long after the colonisation of Taiwan and Korea. Although not displayed directly, the two accounts display the transnationality of penal ideology as both states utilised paternalistic rhetoric to uplift their own international image.

In addition to the justifications, the practices of penal labour usage beyond the rhetoric also falls upon similar lines. Structures under both imperial regimes expanded, assimilated, and maintained empires in their colonised territories. Both examples demonstrate the mobile nature of penal life as labourers were juggled between the military, engineering department, private enterprise and their labour was not restricted to any particular prison or space.⁶ However, one of the unique links I believe both examples hold is their use of their prisoners as skilled labourers. Lee and Huang highlight the profitability of Taipei prison by utilising convicts as skilled labourers that would construct furniture, consumer and military goods for department stores, railway hotels, railway museums, the military and even the royal family.⁷ This correlates strongly to accounts of South Asian convicts being used as skilled labourers for government and private usage. McNair accounts for convicts in Singapore being particularly skilled in brickmaking whose production capacity and quality surpassed any private business and heavily supported the construction of infrastructure for the engineering department.⁸ Statistical accounts of the Strait Settlements detail the revenue generated by ‘selling’ penal labourers to private institutions and other government departments, highlighting the commercialised nature of penal labour usage.⁹ South Asian penal labourers were primarily viewed in the context of their profitability, and as the account details, the eventual abandonment of the practice came primarily from their lack of profitability that provided no incentive to employ them.¹⁰ From these examples, the South Asian and Korean examples show strong similarities as both structures were enforced due to the highly commercialised nature of skilled labour supported by the rhetoric of reform.

Insights into the rhetoric and practices of penal labour usage across both empires speak to the profit-making nature of penal institutions that exist even to this day. As mentioned by Dr Huang in her discussion with the MO4971 class, the privatisation of the US penal system in the use of prisoners as a cheap skilled labour force holds legacies from previous systems of imprisonment, which guise their practices under the rhetoric of reform.

In addition to the above connection, the comparative analysis speaks to the transnational nature of penal history. Although spatial in nature, penal institutions are not isolated to a single compound or building. Rather, the institutions also uphold an ideological foundation that can be inspired, affected and influenced by foreign penal practices and institutions. Penal history also connects to the wider historical narratives of modernity and empire. As reflected in the Japanese example, the operation of Japanese penal institutions resonated with imperial desires to appear modern in the face of western powers, both by upholding a reformist image while sustaining an ever-growing empire. The examples above spoke to the contradictory nature of penal institutions, necessary as a signal of reform and necessary to expand private and imperial interests.

1. Shu-Mei Huang and Hyun Kyung Lee, Heritage, Memory and Punishment: Remembering Colonial Prisons in East Asia (New York, 2020), pp. 31-52. [↩]
2. Ibid., pp. 35-37. [↩]
3. Ibid., p. 49. [↩]
4. John McNair, Prisoners their own Warders (London, 1899), p. 5. [↩]
5. Ibid., p. 159. [↩]
6. Lee and Huang, Heritage, p. 44-45; McNair, Prisoners, p. 66. [↩]
7. Lee and Huang, Heritage, p. 44. [↩]
8. McNair, Prisoners, p. 29; Ibid., p. 58. [↩]
9. Department of Statistics, Government of the Straits Settlements, Straits Settlements Blue Book for the Year 1873, 1874, pp. 38-46. [↩]
10. Ibid., pp. 60-76. [↩]