Transportation from Britain and Ireland, 1615-1875

Abstract

Despite recent research which has revealed the extent to which penal transportation was employed as a labour mobilization device across the Western empires, the British remain the colonial power most associated with the practice.^[1] The role that convict transportation played in the British colonization of Australia is particularly well known. It should come as little surprise that the UNESCO World Heritage listing of places associated with the history of penal transportation is entirely restricted to Australian sites.^[2] The manner in which convict labour was utilized in the development of English (later British) overseas colonial concerns for the 170 years that proceeded the departure of the First Fleet for New South Wales in 1787 is comparatively neglected. There have been even fewer attempts to explain the rise and fall of transportation as a British institution from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries.