Black Convicts: How Slavery Shaped Australia - Santilla Chingaipe [KSIĄŻKA] Konstancin-Jeziorna

The story of Australia’s Black convicts has been all but erased from the history of the British Empire. In recovering their lives, Santilla Chingaipe offers a new paradigm of this fatal shore, showing how empire, slavery, race and memory shaped a nation.'The defining read of the decade. This is a work of global significance.' –MeanjinShortlisted for the 2025 Stella PrizeShortlisted for the 2025 Queensland Literary AwardsLonglisted for the Cundill History Prize 2025Readings Best Books of 2024, Non-FictionImagine African and Caribbean lilts streaming into Botany Bay with the arrival of the First Fleet. Men, women, and children from as far flung places in the Empire as Barbados, Mauritius, and Bermuda – commuted to a colony at the edge of the earth. Santilla Chingaipe is one of Australia’s leading historians on settler colonialism, slavery, and contemporary migration.This is that story, the story of survival and failed redemption; the story of the original 15 Black Convicts stepping ashore 300 years ago, and the hundreds more who followed.Meet David Stuurman, a revered South African chief transported for anti-colonial insurrection and John Caesar, who became Australia’s first bushranger.Or Billy Blue, the stylishly dressed ferryman who gave his name to Sydney’s Blues Point; and William Cuffay, a prominent London Chartist who led the development of Australia’s labour movement.Two of the youngest were cousins from Mauritius—girls aged just 9 and 12—sentenced over a failed attempt to poison their mistress.This book converges histories of Australia’s original and aboriginal Black people with Black settlers of the colonial era.By uncovering lives whitewashed out of our history, in stories spanning Africa, the Americas and Europe, Black Convicts recalibrates our understanding of history and traces Australia’s hidden links to slavery. Chingaipe shows that the injustice of dispossession was driven by the engine of labour exploitation. Black Convicts will change the way we think about who we are.