The British Empire

The English state started to experiment with transportation in the early seventeenth cen­tury although only a few dozen convicts were sent overseas before 1642. Transportation spiked during the Commonwealth, although the claim that 50,000 were sent to the Car­ibbean and North American colonies from Ireland alone in the period 1652-1659 almost certainly represents an overestimate.⁴⁷ Many of those deported from England during this period were prisoners of war, and they continued to be sent until the defeat of the second Jacobite Rebellion at Culloden in 1746.

Thereafter the British experimented with transportation to West Africa, sending at least 1,000 convict soldiers between 1766 and 1784 to forts and trading outposts. While the use of convicts as soldiers came under fire from slaving interests (concerned that the use of white servile labour undermined the racial division of labour), it was reintroduced in 1800

Table 7.2 Estimates of French convict transportation flows, 1552-1938

and continued until the disbanding of the Royal African Corps in 1826.⁵¹ Like other European strategists the British used convicted labour to supplement military strength in tropical areas—a practice that peaked during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars.

The British first sent convicts to Australia in 1787, the Botany Bay decision largely shaped by the lack of alternative transportation destinations. Race became a key con­sideration. Other than as part of a military detachment, it proved increasingly difficult to deploy European unfree labour in the Atlantic world. While it was possible for the British government to supply convicts to the East India Company, the Company had its own source of penal labour. From 1787 it shipped Indian convicts to Bencoolen, a short-lived British outpost on the island of Sumatra (in the East Indies), and from 1790 to the newly conquered island of Penang. By the early nineteenth century it had become Company policy to send Europeans convicted in Indian courts to the Australian penal colonies and Asian convicts to destinations within the wider Indian Ocean world.⁵⁴ However, several hundred black convicts counted among the 167,000 prisoners shipped to Australia from Britain, the Caribbean, Mauritius, the Cape Colony and New Zealand.⁵⁵

As in French Guiana, the British on occasion substituted convicts for slaves, enabling colonial administrators to engage in the rhetoric of abolition while securing an alternative source of labour. When Stamford Raffles took control of Bencoolen in 1818, one of his first acts was to abolish slavery. Almost immediately he replaced slaves with regular shipments of Bengal convicts. Indian convicts were subsequently used in Malacca and Singapore (which with Penang constituted the Straits Settlements), as well as Burma.

Following the abolition of slavery across much of the empire in 1834, the British wound back penal transportation in all areas other than the Asian colonies. The last convicts to depart Britain arrived in Gibraltar in 18 70.⁵⁶ However, the number of convicts sentenced to penal servitude in Britain’s Asian colonies increased. The British had experimented with a penal colony in the Andaman Islands in 1793—1799, shipping 300 convicts until the settlement was devastated by disease and abandoned.⁵⁷ The islands again became a destination for convicts following the 1857 Rebellion and received a further 80,000 convicts up to 1940.⁵⁸

Convict transportation and Western imperialism

As mentioned earlier, over time there occurred a shift in the character of penal transpor­tation, away from the assimilation of convicts into larger labour streams, and towards the establishment of discrete, isolated, penal colonies. Each convict flow was generated, sustained and ultimately abolished for combinations of economic, penal and social reasons, including those bound up with the use of labour for national or imperial expansive strate­gies. Over time the emphasis on extractive labour was maintained. Each was also deeply embedded in a larger repertoire of confinement concerned with the management and control of labour and social ‘undesirables’. Penal transportation, thus, may be situated as part of a wider imperial history of labour, labour management and labour circulation— although this remains largely unrecognised in the current historiography.⁵⁹

Table 7.3 Estimates of British convict transportation flows, 1615-1940

* Straits Settlements — Penang, Malacca and Singapore ** Straits Settlements plus Burma and Hong Kong

In a highly influential claim, often cited since its publication in 1900, HJ.

Despite the potential of penal transportation to help explain that most Eurocentric global phenomenon—the rise of Europe—paradoxically it also offers a less Eurocentric way of understanding global history. The extent of intra-colonial transportation foregrounds not metropolitan flows of convicts outward, but the importance of the geographical ‘circulation’ of convicts. It opens out to view labour mobility as more than a straightforward migratory process with an easily defined geographical start and end point.⁶⁴

In total, over 680,000 convicts were transported by the Western empires in the period 1415—1954 (substantially more if the French use of convicted labour to maintain the ranks of the BILA is included). If the Russian Empire were also incorporated, well over a million convicts were unwillingly co-opted into European colonisation projects.⁶⁵ While this amounts to fewer than the number of slaves and indentured labourers used by European colonisers, transportation played a pioneering role in the colonisation process, through providing the necessary labour to establish colonial bridgeheads. Following the rise of the Atlantic slave trade, penal transportation became pivotal in supplying labour for fortifica­tion construction and defence.

The demographic legacy of convict transportation varies. By and large, convicts did not make a substantial contribution to the growth of colonial populations as death rates were high and only small numbers of women were deported. There are many descendants who proclaim convict ancestry in the Andamans and Australia; but in other places convicts either merged into the wider population when they had children with non-convict women or were repatriated at the end of their sentence.⁶⁷

Transportation was an instrument designed to achieve multiple objectives. It aimed to curb metropolitan crime rates, supply military and civilian labour to areas of colonial shortage, relocate those who threatened imperial security and pacify subject populations through the threat of enforced removal.⁶⁸ Durable and flexible, it provided a tool that framed European colonisation. Convicts were present in the early sorties into North and West Africa and across the Atlantic. Four centuries later they were still there, defending Spanish colonial interests in the Rif, fighting in BILA units in Algeria, manning frontier settlements in Angola and surviving in the Andaman Islands until released by the occupying forces of Japan’s Asian Empire in 1942.

Notes

1 Farley Grubb, ‘The Transatlantic Market for British Convict Labor’, Journal of Economic History, Vol. 60, No. 1 (2000), p. 103.

2 Ruth Pike, ‘Penal Servitude in the Spanish Empire: Presidio Labor in the Eighteenth Century’, The Hispanic American Historical Review, Vol.

3 J.D. Fage, ‘Slaves and Society in Western Africa, c.1445-c.1700’, The Journal of African History, Vol. 21, No. 3 (1980), pp. 307-308.

4 Hamish Maxwell-Stewart, ‘“Like Poor Galley Slaves”: Slavery and Convict Transportation', in Marie Suzette Fernandes Dias (ed.), Legacies of Slavery: Comparative Perspectives (Newcastle, 2007), pp. 48-61.

5 Matthew J. Mancini, One Dies, Get Another: Convict Leasing in the American South, 1866-1928 (Columbia, 1996).

6 Clare Anderson, ‘After Emancipation: Empires and Imperial Formations', in Catherine Hall and Keith McClelland (eds), Emancipation, Slave Ownership and the Remaking of the British Imperial World (Manchester, 2014).

7 Colin Benbow, Boer Prisoners of War in Bermuda (Hamilton, 1962).

8 Maxwell-Stewart, ‘“Like Poor Galley Slaves”', pp. 48-61.

9 Clare Anderson, ‘Convicts and Coolies: Rethinking Indentured Labour in the Nineteenth Century', Slavery and Abolition, Vol. 30, No. 1 (2009), pp. 93-109. See also Anand A. Yang, ‘Indian Convict Workers in Southeast Asia in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries', Journal of World History, Vol. 14, No. 2 (2003), pp. 3-4.

10 James A. Armstrong, ‘The Chinese Exiles', in Nigel Worden (ed.), Cape Town. Between East and

West. Social Identities in a Dutch Colonial Town (Auckland Park, 2012), p. 102; and Kerry Ward, Networks of Empire: Forced Migration in the Dutch East India Company (Cambridge, 2009).

11 Richard Evans, ‘Germany's Convict Exports', History Today, Vol. 47, No. 11 (1997), pp. 11-17.

12 Gerald Bender, Angola Under the Portuguese: The Myth and the Reality (London, 1978), p. 60.

13 Christopher DeCorse, An Archaeology of El Mina (Washington, 2001), pp. 35-36.

14 Timothy Coates, Convicts and Orphans: Forced and State-Sponsored Colonizers in the Portuguese Empire, 1550-1755 (Stanford, 2001); and C.R. Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire, 1415-1825 (London, 1969), p. 313.

15 Charles Boxer, The Golden Age of Brazil, 1695-1750 (Berkeley, 1964), pp. 140 and 301.

16 Bender, Angola Under the Portuguese, pp. 87-88.

17 Ibid., p. 60.

18 Joseph Miller, Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade 1730-1830 (Madison,

1988), pp. 250-251.

19 Bender, Angola Under the Portuguese, p. 61.

20 Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire, p. 90.

21 Boxer, The Golden Age of Brazil, p. 301.

22 Timothy Coates, ‘Preliminary Considerations on European Forced Labor in Angola, 1880-1930: Individual Redemption and the “Effective Occupation” of the Colony', Portuguese Literary & Cultural Studies 15/16:RememberingAngola (2010), pp. 79-106; and Bender, Angola UnderthePortugue.se, pp. 74-93.

23 Timothy Coates, Forced Labor in the Portuguese Empire, 1740-1932 (Leiden, 2013).

24 As cited in Daniel J. Garr, ‘A Rare and Desolate Land: Population and Race in Hispanic California', The Western Historical Quarterly, Vol. 6, No. 2 (1975), p. 137.

25 Johan Thorsten Sellin, Slavery and the Penal System (New York, 1976), p. 63.

26 Judith A. Bense, ‘Presidios of the North American Spanish Borderlands', Historical Archaeology, Vol. 38, No. 3 (2004), pp. 1-5.

27 Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Phillip II, Vol. II, Sian Reynolds (trans.) (Berkeley, 1995), p. 862.

28 Steven, W. Hackel, ‘Land, Labor, and Production: The Colonial Economy of Spanish and Mexican California', Calfornia History, Vol. 76, No. 2/3 (1997), pp. 111-146; Ronald Wayne Childers, ‘The Presidio System in Spanish Florida, 1565-1763', Historical Archaeology, Vol. 38, No. 3 (2004), pp. 24-32; Judith A. Bense, ‘Santa Maria De Galve (1698-1719): A Frontier Garrison in Spanish West Florida', Historical Archaeology, Vol. 38, No. 3 (2004), pp. 47-64.

29 Carlos Marichal and Matilde Souto Mantecbn, ‘Silver and Situados: New Spain and the Financing of the Spanish Empire in the Caribbean in the Eighteenth Century', The Hispanic American Historical Review, Vol. 74, No. 4 (1994), p. 609.

30 Colin M. MacLachlan, Criminal Justice in Eighteenth-Century Mexico: A Study of the Tribunal of Acordada (Berkeley, 1974), pp. 34 and 114.

31 Ruth Pike, ‘Penal Servitude in the Spanish Empire: Presidio Labor in the Eighteenth Century', The Hispanic American Historical Review, Vol. 58, No. 1 (1978), p. 22.

32 Ruth Pike, Penal Servitude in Early Modern Spain (Madison, 1983), pp. 111-133.

33 Manuela Marin, ‘“Hombre Al Moro”: Fugas Del Presidio De Melilla En El Siglo XIX 1846-1869', Hispania, Vol. LXX, No. 234 (2010), p. 49.

34 See Glasgow Herald, 1 March 1886; The Deseret.News, 20 May 1899; Ibrahim K. Sundiata, The Bight of Biafra and Fernando Po in the Era of Abolition, 1827-1930 (Madison, 1996), p. 54.

35 R. Cadman Etches, Patrick Wilson and Richard H. Dillon, ‘A Plan for Convict Colonies in Canada', The Americas, Vol. 13, No. 2 (1956), p. 187.

36 James D. Hardy Jr., ‘The Transportation of Convicts to Colonial Louisiana', Louisiana History, Vol. 7, No. 3 (1966), pp. 707-720; and P.N. Moogk, ‘Reluctant Exiles: Emigrants from France in Canada before 1760', The William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 46, No. 3 (1989), pp. 498-499.

37 Peter Redfield, Space in the Tropics: From Convicts to Rockets in French Guiana (Berkeley, 2000), pp. 56-63.

38 Patricia O'Brien, The Promise of Punishment: Prisons in Nineteenth-Century France (Princeton, 1982), pp. 258-262; and Stephen Toth, Beyond Papillon: The French Overseas Penal Colonies, 1854-1952 (Nebraska, 2006).

39 Colin Forster, France and Botany Bay: The Lure of a Penal Colony (Melbourne, 1996), pp. 128-142; and Redfield, Space in the Tropics, p. 34.

40 Miranda Spieler, Empire and Underworld: Captivity in French Guiana (Cambridge, 2012).

41 Redfield, Space in the Tropics, pp. 66-69.

42 Isabelle Merle, Experiences coloniales: La Nouvelle-Caledonie, 1853-1920 (Paris, 1995); Alice Bullard, Exile to Paradise: Savagery and Civilization in Paris and the South Pacific (Stanford, 2000); O'Brien, The Promise of Punishment, p. 285.

43 Hamish Maxwell-Stewart, ‘Isles of the Dead: Convict Death Rates in Comparative Perspective', Historic Environment, Vol. 24, No. 3 (2012), pp. 26-34.

44 O'Brien, The Promise of Punishment, pp. 274-275.

45 Benjamin McRae Amoss, ‘The Revolution of 1848 and Algeria', The French Review, Vol. 75, No. 4 (2002), pp. 744-754; and Marc Renneville, ‘Les Bagnes coloniaux: de l'utopie au risque du non­lieu', http://criminocorpus.revues.org/173 (accessed 21 October 2012).

46 Dominique Kalifa, Biribi: Les bagnes coloniaux de l'armee fianyai.se (Paris, 2009).

47 Sean O'Callaghan, To Hell or Barbados: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ireland (Dingle, 2000).

48 Carla Pestana, The English Atlantic in the Age of Revolution 1640-61 (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 183-189; David Dobson, Scottish Immigration to Colonial America, 1607-1785 (Athens, Georgia, 2004), pp. 33­36; and Margaret D. Sankey, Jacobite Prisoners of the 1715 Rebellion: Preventing and Punishing Insurrection in Early Hanovarian Britain (Aldershot, 2005), pp. 59-63.

49 Hamish Maxwell-Stewart, ‘Convict Transportation from Britain and Ireland, 1615-1870', History Compass, Vol. 8, No. 11 (2010), p. 1,224; James Kelly, ‘Transportation from Ireland to North America, 1703-1789', in David Dickson and Cormac O Grada (eds), Refiguring Ireland (Dublin, 2003), pp. 112-135; A.R. Ekirch, Bound for America: The Transportation of British Convicts to the Colonies, 1718-75 (Oxford, 1990), pp. 23 and 188.

50 Robert Reece, The Origins of Convict Transportation to New South Wales (Basingstoke, 2001).

51 Peter Burroughs, ‘Crime and Punishment in the British Army, 1815-1870', The English Historical Review, Vol. 100, No. 396 (1985), p. 560; and Emma Christopher and Hamish Maxwell-Stewart, ‘Convict Transportation in Global Context, c. 1700-88', in Alison Bashford and Stuart McIntyre (eds), Cambridge History of Australia, Vol. I (Cambridge, 2013), p. 76.

52 Roger N. Buckley, The British Army in the West Indies: Society and the Military in the Revolutionary Age (Gainsville, 1998), pp. 100-106.

53 British Parliamentary Papers, Sessional Papers printed by Order of the House of Lords, XVII (1840), pp. 18-20.

54 Clare Anderson, Subaltern Lives: Biographies of Colonialism in the Indian Ocean World, 1790-1920 (Cambridge, 2012), pp. 56-92.

55 Cassandra Pybus, Black Founders: The Unknown Story of Australia's First Black Settlers (Sydney, 2006); Kristyn Harman, Aboriginal Convicts: Australian, Khoisan and Maori Exiles (Sydney, 2012); and Anderson, Subaltern Lives, pp. 56-92.

56 Maxwell-Stewart, ‘Convict Transportation', p. 5.

57 Clare Anderson, The Indian Uprising of 1857-8: Prisons, Prisoners and Rebellion (London, 2007), pp. 127-176.

58 British Library, Asia Pacific & Africa Collections, V/10 Andaman & Nicobar Annual Reports, 1872-1940. For other minor flows, see Christopher Munn, ‘The Transportation of Chinese Convicts from Hong Kong', Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, Vol. 8 (1997), pp. 113-145; and The Straits Times, 27 August 1870. All other estimates based on Anderson, Subaltern Lives.

59 For example Leo Lucassen and Jan Lucassen (eds), Migration, Migration History, History (Bern,

2005) ; P. Manning, Migration in World History (London, 2005); ‘Migration and World History', International Review of Social History, Vol. 52 (2007); ‘Discussion: Global Migration', Journal of Global History, Vol. 6, No. 2 (2011). But see U. Bosma, ‘European Colonial Soldiers in the Nineteenth Century: Their Role in White Global Migration and Patterns of Colonial Settlement', Journal of Global History, Vol. 4, No. 2 (2009), pp. 317-336.

60 H.J. Nieboer, Slavery as an Industrial System (The Hague, 1900).

61 Stephen Nicholas, ‘The Convict Labour Markets', in S. Nicholas (ed.) Convict Workers (Cambridge,

1988), pp. 11-126.

62 See Jan Lucassen on these (and other) theoretical and empirical issues: ‘Free and Unfree Labour Before the Twentieth Century: A Brief Overview', in Tom Brass and Marcel van der Linden (eds), Free and Unfree Labour: The Debate Continues (New York, 1997), pp. 45-56.

63 W.M. Robbins, ‘Spatial Escape and the Hyde Park Convict Barracks', Journal of Australian Colonial History, Vol. 7 (2005), pp. 81-96; and Clare Anderson, ‘Convicts and Coolies', pp. 93-109.

64 Prabhu Mohapatra, ‘Eurocentrism, Forced Labour, and Global Migration: A Critical Assessment', International Review of Social History, Vol. 52 (2007), pp. 110-115. Cf. C. Markovits, J. Pouchepadass and S. Subrahmanyam (eds), Society and Circulation (New Delhi, 2003).

65 For Russian estimates and the only previous attempt to enumerate European transportation flows, see Stephen Nicholas and Peter Shergold, ‘Transportation as Global Migration', in Nicholas, Convict Workers, pp. 28-42.

66 Diana Paton, ‘Punishment, Crime, and the Bodies of Slaves in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica', Journal of Social History, Vol. 34, No. 4 (2001), pp. 923-954; and Freeman's Journal and Daily Commercial Advertiser, 4 March 1843.

67 Maxwell-Stewart, ‘Isles of the Dead', p. 34.

68 Hamish Maxwell-Stewart, Closing Hell’s Gates: The Death of a Convict Station (Sydney, 2008), pp. 139-164.

Further reading

Anderson, Clare, Subaltern Lives: Biographies of Colonialism in the Indian Ocean World, 1790-1920 (Cambridge, 2012).

Bullard, Alice, Exile to Paradise: Savagery and Civilization in Paris and the South Pacific (Stanford, 2000).

Coates, Timothy, Convicts and Orphans: Forced and State-Sponsored Colonizers in the Portuguese Empire, 1550­1755 (Stanford, 2001).

Duffield, Ian and James Bradley (eds), Representing Convicts: New Perspectives on Convict Forced Labour Migration (Leicester, 1997).

Ekirch, A.R., Bound for America: The Transportation of British Convicts to the Colonies, 1718-75 (Oxford,

1990).

Kalifa, Dominique, Biribi: Les bagnes coloniaux de l’armee fianyaise (Paris, 2009).

Maxwell-Stewart, Hamish, Closing Hell’s Gates: The Death of a Convict Station (Sydney, 2008).

Nicholas, Stephen (ed.), Convict Workers:Reinterpreting Australia’s Past (Cambridge, 1988).

Pieris, Anoma, Hidden Hands and Divided Landscapes: A Penal History of Singapore’s Plural Society (Honolulu,

2009).

Pike, Ruth, Penal Servitude in Early Modern Spain (Madison, 1983).

Redfield, Peter, Space in the Tropics: From Convicts to Rockets in French Guiana (Berkeley, 2000).

Sen, Satudra, Disciplining Punishment: Colonialism and Convict Society in the Andaman Islands (Oxford, 2000). Shaw, A.G.L., Convicts and Colonies: A Study of Penal Transportation from Great Britain and Ireland to Australia and Other Parts of the British Empire (London, 1966).

Toth, Stephen, Beyond Papillon: The French Overseas Penal Colonies, 1854-1952 (Nebraska, 2006).

Ward, Kerry,.Networks of Empire: Forced Migration in the Dutch East India Company (Cambridge, 2009).