Western Australia and transportation in the British Empire 1615-1939

Abstract

This article explores the extent to which new understandings of the trans-imperial deployment of convicts within the British Empire can shed light on traditional interpretations of the rise of the prison. Through a demonstration of the ways in which the 'great confinement thesis' can be used to explain the transition in punishments and outcomes in the Australian penal colonies, the article argues for a shift in the way that convict transportation has been traditionally viewed. Rather than an alternative to incarceration in a metropolitan penitentiary, the Australian 'experiment' formed part of a wider trans-imperial carceral archipelago that was both informed by metropolitan initiatives and pre-empted subsequent British and Irish 'innovations'. A re-evaluation of rates of execution, flogging and solitary confinement, as well as other institutional and health outcomes, provides an illustration of the extent to which the Foucauldian shift in punishment from the body to the mind was as much a colonial phenomenon as a metropolitan one. While the convicts landed in Fremantle account for only a small proportion of those transported by the British state, the convict era in Western Australia played a critical role in this process.