Between 1415, when the Portuguese first used convict labour in the capture of the Moroccan city of Ceuta, and 1954, when the French penal colony in Guiana closed,

the European powers transported hundreds of thousands of convicts, and employed them as unfree labour in overseas colonies. Because convict transportation has either been framed historiographically within the history of crime and punishment, or viewed as part of the history of one nation or empire, there has been a general failure to understand its pan­European scale and scope.

Famously, the European colonisation of the Americas from the end of the fifteenth century was a coercive process that as a result of the devastation of indigenous peoples relied on the extraction of labour from bonded migrants. The majority of these imported unfree workers were chattel slaves purchased by traders in West and Central Africa, and shipped across the Atlantic and sold into enslavement. However, European labour played an important secondary role largely through the process of indenture—a form of assisted migration whereby an individual forfeited claims to wages for a number of years in return for a passage to an overseas colony.¹ Convicts were also transported from Britain, Ireland, Portugal, France and Spain and either sold for the period of their sentence or set to work for the state. The exploitation of penal labour was relatively new to early modern Europe although a practice widespread in the classical world. While several medieval European societies retained provisions to put convicted prisoners to work, most lacked the infrastructure and resources to implement a system of systematic penal exploitation, instead resorting to execution and other inexpensive public displays of state power.

Penal transportation both pre-dated and outlasted Atlantic slavery. As a practice, the removal of convict labour from Britain and Ireland was modelled on indenture, although it was a more extreme process that was socially and commercially comparable to slavery. Indeed some slaving practices can be viewed as a form of transportation, especially judicial slavery where the condemned (and on occasion their relatives) became the property of the state. This was a common route into bondage in West Africa.³ It should be noted that slavery, penal transportation and indenture have complex intertwined histories. To provide but one of many examples: convict labour on plantations in the British Caribbean was replaced in the second half of the seventeenth century by slave labour, which was in turn replaced in the nineteenth century by indentured labour from South Asia and China. In short, the three processes—penal transportation, indenture (European and Asian) and enslavement—were strongly related to each other and did not exist as distinct practices.

Although slavery is ancient, persistent and global, it is particularly associated with European colonisation of the New World. The slave trade came under increasing attack, however, because of its unsustainability in the context of the widespread resistance of the enslaved (most famously in the Revolution of 1791—1804 in the French colony of Saint-Domingue), and pressure from metropolitan abolitionists, whether on the grounds of humanitarianism or political economy. Despite this pressure the slave trade and slavery itself were abolished only gradually across the European empires. The British outlawed slave trading in 1807 and slavery in 1834 (with ex-slaves forced into supposedly transitional ‘apprenticeships’); but under East India Company pressure, Parliament excluded the Indian Empire from the 1833 Emancipation Act.

The longevity of penal transportation as a system of securing cheap labour to aid colonial expansion can be ascribed to four inter-related factors. First, convict transporta­tion attracted remarkably little comment from either metropolitan elites or colonial interlocutors since it could be argued that, unlike slaves, convicts were the agents of their own destiny.⁴ Thus convicts—especially when sentenced in the colonies—attracted relatively little metropolitan or colonial concern.

Second, convict transportation was flexible in that it provided a means of securing a cheap, controllable and easily replaceable form of labour, and convicts could be forced to go to places where free labourers would not settle. The point here is not to compare sufferings, but to note that, though they often lived and worked under remarkably similar conditions, slaves represented a financial investment, whereas convicts usually did not. As Matthew Mancini so memorably recalled, repeating an elderly businessman’s description of the leasing of convict labour in the American south: One Dies, Get Another.⁵

Third, penal transportation delivered an effective tool for policing metropolitan and colonial populations. In this sense it might be viewed as one element of the expansion of colonial governmentality, as well as the more general shift from the private to public management of labour in the age of imperial expansion.⁶

Fourth, transportation was perceived as less costly than the penal alternative—the construction of new or extension of existing penitentiaries—a point that holds even though it co-existed with local incarceration and even if it was subsequently argued that trans­portation systems and penal colonies cost more than convict labour saved in the hire of free labour. An exploration of these processes and the connections between them provides an account of the origins, longevity and ultimate demise of convict transportation within Western empires.