Abstract
From the seventeenth to twentieth centuries, approximately 380,000 transportation convicts journeyed to and around locations across the British Empire. This article explores the scale, reach and significance of these convict flows in the period after 1788, arguing for a transnational history of penal transportation in the Australian colonies and Indian Ocean. It quantifies convict numbers, and maps convict destinations, providing comparative data on their intra-imperial character to construct a new cartography of criminal justice and Empire. Focusing on Asian convict flows, this enables an articulation of the relationship between transportation, population management and repression, as well as other forms of coerced labour migration, including African and Asian enslavement and indenture. The history of penal transportation proposed here thus moves beyond an exploration of its role in the outward metropolitan expansion of Empire, and towards an appreciation of its importance in labour extraction and governance within the larger imperial world.
Highlights
From the seventeenth to twentieth centuries, approximately 380,000 transportation convicts journeyed to and around locations across the British Empire
The first early-modern transportations were from Britain and Ireland to the Americas, including Bermuda and the Caribbean islands, which together received around 69,000 convicts
They were often indentured into servitude for fixed terms, and worked on plantations alongside African slaves
Summary
From the seventeenth to twentieth centuries, approximately 380,000 transportation convicts journeyed to and around locations across the British Empire. For over three hundred years during the seventeenth to twentieth centuries, around 380,000 transportation convicts journeyed to and around the plantations, penal settlements and penal colonies of the British Empire (Table 1).[1] The first early-modern transportations were from Britain and Ireland to the Americas, including Bermuda and the Caribbean islands, which together received around 69,000 convicts They were often indentured into servitude for fixed terms, and worked on plantations alongside African slaves. The American colonies were closed to convicts following the declaration of Independence in 1776, and for a short time transportation continued to the forts and trading posts of West Africa, which received in total about one thousand convicts
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