Friends of Freedom: The Rise of Social Movements in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions by Micah Alpaugh

have been missing. Each of these are interdisciplinary concerns, and Anderson’s approach is shaped by and contributes to two key cross-disciplinary frameworks that have oriented studies of global history for at least the last thirty years—empire and knowledge. Part I of the book examines in detail how empires and states used convict labor (often alongside or instead of other forms of coerced labor) to secure territories and borderlands, to clear forests and transform other environments, to settle and farm, and to build crucial infrastructure. Part II shows how knowledge of the convict system itself was generated and circulated, but also that convicts were part of the production and circulation of global forms of knowledge about bodies, nature, and society, particularly in the nineteenth century. Convicts were involved in exploration and natural history at the margins of empire, but also in studies that used new techniques of bodily measurement and social science to test theories of medicine, criminality and race, and of changing social structures. While these are histories of power and control, Anderson is constantly alert to the ways in which convicts resisted, subverted, and moved against authority in order to make their own lives where they could and to produce, reproduce, and circulate radical and subversive political ideas. Overall, Convicts: A Global History is a remarkable achievement, a work of global history based on many years of research that restores a subaltern group to its place in the world through both a panoramic overview and the tracing of individual lives lived in extremis.