The Convict Peace: The Imperial Context of the 1833 Convict Revolt at Castle Forbes

Abstract

This paper places a well-known controversy about the jurisdiction of nineteenth-century magistrates in its imperial context. In particular it shows how and why conversations about convict management and the jurisdiction of magistrates in New South Wales were interwoven with contemporary conversations about the law and government of slavery. In 1833 in the aftermath of the Castle Forbes Revolt, convicts, administrators and magistrates in New South Wales borrowed the language of disorder and good governance from debates about the amelioration of slavery because those languages made sense of an experience that was both deeply local and shared. Convicts were not slaves; but masters, magistrates, convicts and slaves all experienced substantial shifts in the relations among empire, colonial states and local institutions of governance that redefined their privileges and obligations in the first decades of the nineteenth century. The contest between magistrate-masters and convicts in the aftermath of the Castle Forbes Revolt thus demonstrates the importance of exploring the legal transformation of empire through interconnected histories of everyday order.