Timothy J. Coates is without doubt the world’s leading expert on forced labor and forced migration beyond slavery and the slave trade in the longue durée of the Portuguese empire. This long-awaited second book, as Coates himself states, is a follow-on from his first, Convicts and Orphans: Forced and State-Sponsored Colonization in the Portuguese Empire, 1550–1755 (Stanford, 2001). Read together, these books cover almost four centuries of coerced labor in the Portuguese empire as the Portuguese state and its empire were forming and changing over time. Coates’s research is truly global in scope. His path-breaking books have contributed to several fields beyond Portuguese imperial history, including comparative penal transportation, comparative empire, and world history. Convict Labor in the Portuguese Empire appropriately concludes with a chapter that discusses the comparative context of what Clare Anderson has termed the global “carceral archipelago.”
Coates has a novel and transparent approach to his major...