Hamish Maxwell-Stewart is a professor of heritage and digital humanities at the University of New England, Australia. Over the last decade he has led a team that has assembled detailed life course data for 75,000 convicted criminals sent to Britain’s Australian colonies to be worked as cheap labor. As well as exploring the impact of punishments on life expectancy and other consequences of labor exploitation, he also works on the history of protest. His recent book Unfree Workers (co-authored with Michael Quinlan) has been described as a “monumental study of Antipodean workplace struggles that explores the central role played by unfree labor in the development of global capital.”
This Sawyer Seminar is funded by the Mellon Foundation.