On July 4th 2018, the eminent scholar of empire, Professor Philippa Levine (University of Texas, Austin), launched my edited volume, A Global History of Convicts and Penal Colonies, at the annual conference of the Australian Historical Association, held at ANU, Canberra. This volume is one of the key outcomes of my ‘Carceral Archipelago’ project. […]
After finishing my PhD at the Carceral Archipelago project in September 2017, I became the Pearsall Fellow in Naval and Maritime History at the Institute of Historical Research. This involved not only a move to London, but a move into a new discipline. As a historian of punishment, I was interested in the way that […]
The main objective of the ‘Carceral Archipelago’ project has been to write the history of convicts and penal colonies into global history, by synthesizing existing research on some geographical contexts with new work on others. My edited volume, A Global History of Convicts and Penal Colonies, published in May 2018 , represents an important […]
By Dr Kristyn Harman Senior Lecturer in History, University of Tasmania Like many New Zealanders, I grew up hearing stories about the Australian penal colonies, particularly anecdotes of London pickpockets and similarly desperate, impoverished characters, and the harsh and sometimes unfair regimes of punishment and deprivation under which such convicts lived and laboured. These […]
By Anna McKay, AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Partnership Student, National Maritime Museum & University of Leicester. In 1775 the outbreak of the American Revolution halted the transportation of felons to the colonies. One year later, with gaols overflowing, the Criminal Law Act -also known as the ‘Hulks Act’- was passed. Convicts awaiting transportation were […]
By Dr. Lorraine M. Paterson On April 18, 2008, Vietnamese journalist Danh Đức was standing in the rain at the Kourou Space Center, the European Space Agency’s spaceport in French Guiana, a territory that is, as an overseas département, still an integral part of France.[1] Eyes heavenward, Danh Đức was eager to witness the […]
The small sandstone island of Cockatoo Island in Sydney Harbour is best known as a convict stockade which held the ‘worst’ of the convict system: former-Norfolk Islanders and bushrangers are its most famous inhabitants. However, from the 1850s onwards Cockatoo Island acted primarily as a local prison for those convicted in the colony of […]
Chekhov’s contribution to the cultural landscape of the Sakhalin penal colony (1868-1905), the establishment of several school libraries containing more than 2,200 volumes for the island’s children and their convict parents, has received little attention compared with the acclaim accorded his prodigious 1890 demographic census of prisoners. “I visited every settlement and went into every hut,” he wrote.”I don’t […]
By Kellie Moss The sentence of transportation signified the physical removal, or banishment of convicts, from the wider social body to colonies overseas. In the case of transportation to Australia (1788-1868), convicts were not allowed to return to Britain, even after the expiration of their sentences. This permanent severance of their connections to friends, family […]
One of the wonderful things about ‘blue skies’ research is the element of surprise that it can throw up. When I began work on ‘The Carceral Archipelago’ project, I had not planned to work on the British Caribbean. I had long been aware of early-modern British and Irish convict flows to islands like Barbados, […]
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