'Young Seaman', National Maritime Museum, image PU8577

Convicts and the Sea: the naval influence on Gibraltar Convict Establishment

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 […]

Conference Report: Forced Labour, Confinement and Represssion: European, Imperial and Post-Colonial perspectives.

Conference Report: Forced Labour, Confinement and Represssion: European, Imperial and Post-Colonial perspectives.

  Two weeks ago, a joint workshop on ‘Forced labour, confinement and repression: European, Imperial and Post-Colonial Perspectives’ was hosted by The Carceral Archipelago project and The Stanley Burton Centre for Genocide and Holocaust Studies, both at the University of Leicester. Our aim was to bring into dialogue practices of coercion, confinement and forced labour […]

Attitudes to Convict Ancestry: Documentary Review

Attitudes to Convict Ancestry: Documentary Review

In this blog post I review the documentary ‘A Secret History of my Family: Gadbury Sisters’, which aired in 2016, and discuss how it reflects changing attitudes to convict ancestry amongst British and Australian descendants. It is re-blogged from the the wonderful History on the Box in which postgraduate students from the School of History, Politics and IR at the […]

The Two Fredericks: A snapshot of male intimacy in prison

The Two Fredericks: A snapshot of male intimacy in prison

In the 1840s, campaigners for the abolition of convict transportation engaged in a campaign of scare-mongering about the prevalence of sexual acts between male convicts (dubbed “unnatural acts”).  This strand of anti-transportation rheotirc was particularly effective because it suggested that a system that was supposed to engender moral reform actually produced moral degradation.[1] Panic about rampant homosexual activity […]

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