Defining convict transportation
Any attempt to enumerate the contribution of convict labour to European overseas colonial development rests on a definition of what constitutes penal transportation. A transported worker can be seen as an individual convicted by a civil or military court and subsequently relocated to a colony to perform labour services for a period at least nominally defined by the sentence passed upon him or her.
While it is sometimes assumed that the labour of transported convicts was exploited exclusively by the state, historically this was far from the case. Thus seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British and French transportation systems relied on the sale of convicts to the private sector, where they were treated as a form of indentured labour. This illustrates the way in which convict transportation is often difficult to distinguish from other forms of labour extraction. As already pointed out, many West Africans were condemned into slavery as a result of sentences imposed upon them. The only distinction between this practice and European transportation is that, in contrast to slaves, the children of convicts were born free.Another area of potential confusion revolves around the question of what constitutes conviction. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, for example, it was not uncommon for prisoners of war to be transported. Despite the lack of a formal sentence, the state treated such individuals as convicts, especially when deemed to be in a state of rebellion. Parallels appear here with the Spanish use of transportation as a tool for dealing with rebellious Apache in America or indeed the transportation of ‘mutineers’ from India to the Andaman Islands in 1858. This survey includes rebels as convicts where they are fed into existing transportation flows, though it excludes prisoners of war removed to various outposts of empire, but not subjected to coercive labour extraction. Thus, 26,000 Afrikaners taken in the South African War (1899—1902) were moved to camps in St Helena, India, Ceylon and Bermuda.
They were, however, not required to work, let alone work alongside other unfree migrants.7Finally, a considerable overlap existed between transportation and military service. The Portuguese, Spanish and British deployed prisoners convicted by civil and military courts as soldiers in areas associated with high death rates. The French operated a sophisticated variant of this system whereby on release from gaol petty criminals were forced to serve as conscripts in the notorious Bataillons d’Infanterie Legere d’Afrique (BILA). While these units were not manned by serving convicts, conviction was a necessary prerequisite of service; the BILA functioned as a military equivalent of the civil bagne in Guiana, stationed in North Africa and other colonial theatres.
The question of what ordinary people thought about penal transportation adds further depth to the question of definition. Though differences between penal and other labour categories may have seemed obvious (and meaningful) to colonial officials, it is less clear that subject populations drew such distinctions. Given the preceding sketch of the multiple overlaps between unfree labour practices, this should not be surprising. In the Australian colonies, for instance, British and Irish convicts called themselves ‘slaves’, at least in part as a rhetorical alignment and an appeal to the anti-transportation lobby.8 In the Indian penal settlement in Mauritius, South Asian convicts used the description sipahis (soldiers), and in Singapore they used kumpane ke naukur (East India Company servants), which was also bound up with the idea of military service (naukur).9