Visitors to the Breton city of Brest can take the téléphérique from the edge of the city center across the Penfeld River to an arts complex housed in the old arsenal buildings high on the opposite bank. This cable car offers an unparalleled view of what was a huge penal-military-industrial complex, a set of docks and quays for the French navy, built largely by the labor of convicts incarcerated in the city’s riverside bagne—one of France’s largest prisons—and its galleys. When the prison was shut in 1858 for being too soft on its inmates, convicts were shipped across the oceans, under a law passed in 1854, to penal colonies in French Guiana and, after 1864, New Caledonia, where they cleared land, farmed, and built more infrastructure for the French empire. As Anderson’s new book demonstrates, the sorts of connections between empire, penal regimes, and labor revealed by convicts’ mobile...

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