The imperial scale and reach of penal transportation
The labour services that convicts performed were diverse and could encompass land clearance; infrastructural work, including the building of barracks, fortifications, roads and bridges; agriculture and cultivation of rubber, silk and salt; tin and coal mining; working as personal servants or grooms; or maritime or military service.
During the initial stages of colonisation convicts were often deployed in ‘frontier’ zones. These covered culturally unfamiliar, uninhabited and densely forested lands, littorals and islands. In these years, in general terms convict flows coalesced with those of other migrants, notably of African slaves and European indentured labourers. From the end of the eighteenth century, however, the character of the flows changed and most convicts were sent to specially designated penal settlements and colonies. There attempts were made to isolate them from neighbouring communities, whether consisting of indigenous people or migrant settlers.These penal settlements and colonies could be remarkably socially complex. Though most convicts were put to hard labour, in some cases, suitably qualified or educated transportees became convict clerks, overseers, policeman and foremen. The overwhelming majority of convicts were men, and women tended to form a small cohort. This meant many penal settlements and colonies were significantly homosocial. Convict women were often (though not always) confined separately, and put to different kinds of domestic labour. Furthermore, convict flows were characterised by complex racial stratifications; and European, African, American, Amerindian, Asian and Eurasian convicts could be shipped to different colonies or settlements, separated within them and/or made subject to differential penal and work regimes.
Four European nations made extensive use of convict transportation to assist the wider process of colonisation.
The Portuguese, Spanish, British and French deployed convicts to over forty colonial destinations bordering the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific Oceans. While some Russian convicts were shipped by sea from the Black Sea port of Odessa to the island of Sakhalin in the years 1879—1905, most were moved overland to Siberia. Because of its largely terrestrial nature, we have omitted the Russian use of transportation from this account, concentrating instead on Western European movement of convicts to and between colonies linked by sea routes. There nonetheless existed many similarities between Russian and other European transportation systems, not least the use of convicts to supply cheap labour on colonial frontiers.Some other European polities also experimented with transportation. Dutch East India Company courts imposed sentences of transportation on colonial populations, its settlement in the Cape receiving an estimated 2,500 Asian convicts in the period to 1799; most were convicted in Batavia.10 The Habsburgs used convict labour to stabilise frontier zones, and the Prussian state sold convicts to the Russians.11 No evidence indicates, however, that transportation was used to supply convicts to German or Italian colonies or the Belgian Congo. This is probably not accidental, as the Western empires that made the heaviest use of transportation had a history of involvement in other unfree labour practices, notably slavery.