This book examines the local, national, and international significance of convict labour during the colonization of Hokkaido between 1881 and 1894. Based on the analysis of archival, it uses a framework of global prison studies to trace the historical origins of prisons and forced labour in early modern Japan.

Pia Maria Jolliffe is a Research and Teaching Associate at the Nissan Institute of Japanese Studies and a Research Fellow at Blackfriars Hall, University of Oxford, UK. She is the author of Learning, Migration and Intergenerational Relations: The Karen and the Gift of Education (2016).

List of illustrations

Technical notes

Acknowledgements

Foreword

Introduction

1 Forced labour and arrest in Edo and Ezo

2 Hokkaido prison island

3 Prisons and rural development, 1881-1886

4 Hard labour as penal servitude, 1886-1894

5 Conclusion

Index