‘The Scum of France’: Australian Anxieties towards French Convicts in the Nineteenth Century

Between the 1860s and the early decades of the twentieth century, escaped and liberated French convicts from the penal colony in New Caledonia arrived on Australian shores, raising concerns about physical as well as moral contamination. This article combines Australian sources with French consular and ministerial archives to examine the impact this little-known episode of trans-imperial history had on the early Australian federal process. The arrival of the convicts and former convicts played on at least two levels. It highlighted the colonial authorities’ weak powers in asserting their territorial sovereignty and policies and pitted them against both Great Britain and the French. Further, the constant nudging of these unwelcome neighbours disrupted the ongoing disavowal of the colonies’ convict past.     

Transnational Histories of Penal Transportation: Punishment,Labour and Governance in the British Imperial World, 1788–1939

From the seventeenth to twentieth centuries, approximately 380,000 transportation convicts journeyed to and around locations across the British Empire. This article explores the scale, reach and significance of these convict flows in the period after 1788, arguing for a transnational history of penal transportation in the Australian colonies and Indian Ocean. It quantifies convict numbers, and maps convict destinations, providing comparative data on their intra-imperial character to construct a new cartography of criminal justice and Empire. Focusing on Asian convict flows, this enables an articulation of the relationship between transportation, population management and repression, as well as other forms of coerced labour migration, including African and Asian enslavement and indenture. The history of penal transportation proposed here thus moves beyond an exploration of its role in the outward metropolitan expansion of Empire, and towards an appreciation of its importance in labour extraction and governance within the larger imperial world.     

Ghosts of Sorrow,Sin and Crime: Dark Tourism and Convict Heritage in Van Diemen’s Land,Australia

Established as a British imperial penal colony, Van Diemen’s Land received approximately 75,000 convicts before cessation of convict transportation in 1853. A vast network of penal stations and institutions were created to accommodate, employ, administer, and discipline these exiled felons. Popular interpretations of Australia’s convict past highlight dynamics of shame, avoidance and active obliteration that characterized Australia’s relationship to its recent convict past. Yet, closer examination of these colonial institutions suggests a far more ambivalent relationship with this “dark heritage,” evidenced by continuous tourism and visitation to these places of pain and shame from the mid-nineteenth century to the present.     

Flogging Parsons? Australian Anglican Clergymen,the Magistracy,and Convicts, 1788–1850

In colonial Australian history the entanglement of clergymen, colony, and empire has made the Anglican clergyman one of the colonies' more controversial figures. Historical and popular understanding of this encounter has been overshadowed by the “flogging parson” and “moral policeman” traditions in Australian historiography. Centring on prominent parson‐magistrates such as the Reverend Samuel Marsden, prevailing interpretations have emphasized individual clergymen's efforts to inculcate convict discipline and deference. Examined collectively, however, a less negative and impressionistic picture of colonial clergymen emerges. In contrast with established views, this article demonstrates that parson‐magistrates consistently provided pastoral care and advocacy at the parish level, while as writers and activists they worked for the structural reform and eventual abolition of the convict system itself. Their collective efforts are the focus of this article, which in turn offers a fresh assessment of the encounter between clergymen and convicts in Australia before 1850.     

Making Headway: The Introduction of Western Civilization in Colonial Northern Nigeria

This article scrutinises attempts by the British Foreign and Colonial Office to control information in its colonies between 1946 and 1950. Several factors combined to alter the ground on which colonial officials operated in this period: an emerging ‘Cold War’ between Britain and its wartime Soviet ally, international debates about creating an enforceable catalogue of ‘human rights' and a heightened emphasis on public relations within British colonies as a strategy for imperial governance. These factors converged in the response of colonial officials to the writing of one of the most notorious anti-colonial activists in Britain at the time, George Padmore. By analysing British Colonial Office reports of Soviet propaganda in their colonies, the article suggests new analysis about some of the ways in which the rhetoric of the Cold War impacted on Britain's approach to empire after the Second World War.     

To Watch or Restrain: Female Convict Prisons in 19th-Century Tasmania

As institutions established to manage exiled British felons, the Tasmanian female factories consisted of four women's prisons located throughout the island colony. The material world of these institutions mediated internal power relations. Superintendents, Convict Department Officials, and the female prisoners themselves manipulated site landscapes. Today, one of these institutions remains as a managed historic site. Tourists experience a tidy and unthreatening landscape of Australia's heroic convict heritage. By juxtaposing excavated archaeological remains with public presentations of convict sites, I explore the position of female convicts from the original penal landscape to the shadows of Australian history.     

Indentured servitude and convict labour in the Danish-Norwegian West Indies, 1671–1755

The article explores how indentured servitude and the use of convict labour began and evolved in the Danish-Norwegian West Indies in the period 1671–1755. It examines the intentions and realities behind indentured servitude and convict labour on the islands, and compares these with the workings and use of indentured servants in the British West Indies.

Similar to conditions in the British West Indies, the lowest social strata of white society in the Danish-Norwegian West Indies consisted of a small population of convicts and indentured servants. The use of these groups as part of the labour force took place from the onset of colonisation in 1672 until 1755, the period in which the islands were governed by the West Indian and Guinean Company, WIGC (Vestindisk-Guineisk Kompagni). The analysis reveals that the importation and deployment of indentured servants and convicts can be divided into two distinct periods. Until 1700, the objective of the WIGC was to provide cheap labour for the colony. After 1700, however, the aim was to recruit qualified personnel and to secure the planters against slave rebellion by increasing the white Danish population. As convicts provided neither qualifications nor security, convict transportations to the Danish-Norwegian West Indies ceased after 1700. After 1755, when the Danish-Norwegian Crown purchased the colonies from the WIGC, Danish convict labour and indentured servants were no longer imported to the colony. By contrast, in the British West Indies, imports of indentured servants and convicts continued to play a significant role.

The article explores the physical and legal conditions of the indentured servants and convicts, who constituted the lowest social group in white colonial society and were in some respects considered slaves.     

Time to write: convict petitions in the 19th century

Nineteenth-century convicts regularly used their right to petition the state. Their institutionalised lives were spent under repressive and harsh penal systems, designed to inhibit communication, but petitioning provided a channel of expression that must have been sorely absent from the monotony of their life in prison. Convicts commonly used petitions to complain about perceived injustices in their sentencing or to request early release on probation, leaving written records of the different experiences, motivations and objectives of petitioners. These written voices therefore provide the basis for a unique window into convict lives in the 19th century.     

Colonization, kidnap and confinement in the Andamans penal colony, 1771–1864

This paper explores practices of kidnap and confinement in the Andamans penal colony, for the period 1771-1864. It argues that during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries indigenous captivity was key to successful colonization. The British kidnapped islanders in an effort to educate them about the supposed benefits of colonial settlement, and in the hope that they would become their cultural advocates. The paper shows also that the close observations that accompanied the confinement of islanders informed global discussions about ‘race’ and ‘origin’, so that the Islands were brought into a larger global frame of understanding around indigenous - settler contact. The paper draws out some of the complexities and specificities of the colonial encounter in the Andamans. It argues that with respect to sexual violence, there was a significant gender dimension to colonization and confinement. Finally, it suggests that in a settlement comprising a penal colony and its associated infrastructure (and no free settlement) there were no straightforward distinctions between ‘colonizer’ and ‘colonized’. Rather, there were significant overlaps between the treatment and experiences of convicts and islanders, and these expressed something of the inherent ambiguities of the penal colonization of the Andamans itself.     

Investigating Empire: Humanitarians,Reform and the Commission of Eastern Inquiry

In the wake of the Napoleonic wars, British debates about colonial rule and, in particular, the treatment of subject peoples brought practical, financial and religious concerns together. As a means of addressing these problems, the British government despatched a series of travelling commissions to survey and reform the governance of its empire. British-based humanitarians and abolitionists drew on anxieties about the corrupting influence of empire on metropolitan society to press for commissions as vectors of imperial probity; their colonial counterparts harnessed the commissions' authority to inform and persuade a metropolitan audience of the need for specific colonial reforms. This article explores humanitarian attempts to influence colonial and imperial policy by considering the Commission of Eastern Inquiry, appointed in 1822 to investigate successively the Cape Colony, Mauritius and Ceylon. The Commission's history underscores links between networks of metropolitan and colonial humanitarians, and between anti-slavery activists and supporters of indigenous rights.     

Union Jack or Yellow Jack? Smallpox,Sailors, Settlers and Sovereignty

In 1877 the flagship of the Royal Navy’s Australia Station, HMS Wolverene, was quarantined in Sydney Harbour. It marked a curious moment in which the dreaded disease smallpox arrived in the city aboard three different vessels within the space of a month. With cases appearing among merchant seamen, naval sailors and local residents, this event exposed numerous antinomies in the health governance of New South Wales. If the colony’s legislative authority over the imperial warships tasked with its protection proved uncertain, so did the extent to which civic power could be exerted over the movements, property and bodies of individual citizens. Exploring the conjoint histories of the naval and medical defence of the Australian colonies, this article argues that 1877 saw these tensions playing out on different scales of sovereignty. Marking a critical point before colonial defence and quarantine strategies turned markedly against ‘Asiatics’, this incident encapsulated the uneasy state of colonial self-government amid a technological transformation of the seaways.     

‘… For it was founded upon a Rock’: Gibraltar and the Purposes of Empire in the Mid-Nineteenth Century

In 1853–54, cholera in Britain forced the leadership at the tiny British fortress colony of Gibraltar to make a choice. Should the colony quarantine ships from Britain or leave the maritime frontier open to ships from the metropolitan centre of empire? The first choice secured imperial communication between London and the Rock, but it also jeopardised Gibraltar's land access to Southern Spain, as the failure to quarantine British ships would surely force Spanish authorities to close their border to protect against pandemic disease. Contrapuntally, the decision to protect Gibraltarian trade with Spain undermined any substantive claim to British ‘control’ over its colonial possession. The choice here was highlighted by Gibraltar's colonial governor, General Sir Robert Gardiner, who insisted that Gibraltar be governed as a British colony and kept open to the colonial centre at all costs, and Gibraltar's merchant community, a group that feared the economic consequences of a frontier closure at Gibraltar enough to favour keeping the Rock's quarantine policies in line with Spanish regulations rather than those set by Britain. As a result of this medical dispute, Gibraltar became a pivotal location, a metonym for a much broader conversation about the uses and purposes of Britain's overseas empire in the middle years of the nineteenth century.     

Convict ancestry: a neglected aspect of Australian identity

Abstract Claiming descent from convicts who were sent to Australia during the early period of British settlement is more than just about blood ties, it is also an aspect of national identity for many Australians. Analyses of nationally representative survey data show that younger, left‐leaning, working class Australians are most likely to identify as convict descendants, while older, high income, educated, city dwellers are least likely to identify. Our findings also suggest that the ‘hated stain’ of convict ancestry is senescent, and will diminish with intergenerational replacement. Yet claims to convict descent remain divided along status lines. Interest in convicts and claims of convict heritage may comprise an element of ‘popular taste’, but as a consequence of this popularity, ‘convict chic’ is rejected by educated elites. Embraced by ‘middle Australia’, but shunned by cosmopolitan elites, convict ancestry is a neglected aspect of Australian identity. Whether claims of convict ancestry are ‘real’ or ‘imaginary’, the power of foundation myths to provide shared memories is evident in the salience of convict connections in Australia.     

Sister-in-Law Marriage in the Empire: Religious Politics and Legislative Reform in the Australian Colonies 1850–1900

In 1835, a statute was passed in the parliament of the United Kingdom making it illegal for a widowed man to marry his sister-in-law. 1 Lord Lyndhurst's Act (1835) 5 & 6 Will VI c. 54. Marriage to a sister-in-law after a wife's death was common practice in nineteenth-century England and colonial Australia and aunts often took on the responsibility of raising children after a sibling's death. In the 1840s, a protracted parliamentary and social debate began over whether a widowed man's marriage to his sister-in-law should be made legal and this debate lasted over seven decades. In the Australian colonies, where English law had been inherited, 2 Those Australian colonies settled prior to the passing of Lord Lyndhurst's Act inherited the English position regarding deceased wife's sister marriage at the time, that such unions were voidable in the ecclesiastical courts during the lifetime of the parties, and in those colonies established afterwards, the 1835 statute applied and deceased wife's sister unions were illegal. In both cases colonial parliaments attempted to pass legislation to clarify the law. a similar debate occurred in the 1870s. The marriage was legalised in most of Australia in the 1870s while it remained illegal in England until the turn of the century. The parallel debates in each country provide a window into the comparative effect of religious culture on the development of marriage law. One of the primary reasons for the protracted nature of the struggle for marriage reform in England was its significance for the relationship between church and state. This article explores the implications of the relationship between church and state in Britain and the colonies for marriage legislation.     

Recollecting bones: the remains of German-Australian colonial entanglements

This article critically engages with the different politics of memory involved in debates over the restitution of Indigenous Australian ancestral remains stolen by colonial actors in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and brought to Berlin in the name of science. The debates crystallise how deeply divided German scientific discourses still are over the question of whether the historical and moral obligations of colonial injustice should be accepted or whether researchers should continue to profess scientific ‘disinterest’. The debates also reveal an almost unanimous disavowal of Indigenous Australian knowledges and mnemonic conceptions across all camps. The bitter ironies of this disavowal become evident when Indigenous Australian quests for the remains of their ancestral dead lost in the limbo of German scientific collections are juxtaposed with white Australian (fictional) quests for the remains of Ludwig Leichhardt, lost in the Australian interior.     

Imagining an Imperial Modernity: Universities and the West African Roots of Colonial Development

This article takes the formation and work of the ‘Elliot’ Commission on Higher Education in West Africa (1943–45) to reconsider the roots of British colonial development. Late colonial universities were major development projects, although they have rarely been considered as such. Focusing particularly on the Nigerian experience and the controversy over Yaba Higher College (founded 1934), the article contends that late colonial plans for universities were not produced in Britain and then exported to West African colonies. Rather, they were formed through interactions between agendas and ideas with roots in West Africa, Britain and elsewhere. These debates exhibited asymmetries of power but produced some consensus about university development. African and British actors conceptualised modern education by combining their local concerns with a variety of supra-local geographical frames for development, which included the British Empire and the individual colony. The British Empire did not in this case forestall development, but shaped the ways in which development was conceived.     

Politicians,Merchants, and Colonial Maritime War: The Political and Economic Background of the American Act of 1708

During the War of the Spanish Succession (1702–13), there were attempts to support colonial maritime war by legislation, and the American Act of 1708 can be seen as their culmination. Historians who study privateering or colonial history have referred to this act in several contexts, such as reform in prize administration, naval impressment in American colonies, and Spanish‐American trade. However, the political and economic interests behind this act have not been fully investigated. By examining the process of the enactment of the American Act together with antecedent attempts to promote colonial maritime war in parliament, this article reveals the political and vested interests involved in the act, the relations between them, and the influence they had on the content of the act. This analysis will show the complex interaction between politics, trade, and colonial maritime war in the early‐18th‐century American colonies.     

Whores Aboard and Laws Abroad: English Women and Sexual Slander in Early Colonial New South Wales

In the nineteenth century, a gendered reform movement – the Slander of Women Acts – swept through the British common law world, making it easier for women to sue for defamatory allegations of sexual immorality. By examining two slander cases brought by women in early New South Wales and radical reforms passed in 1847, this article locates the Australian colonies within this global campaign. Arguing that slander worked to reinscribe a woman's colonial category, police ‘savage’ speech and rectify respectability for economic purposes, it shows how ideas of reputation and its protection diverged across the UK, USA and Australia at this time.     

Constructing British Authority in Australasia: Charles Cooper and the Legal Status of Aborigines in the South Australian Supreme Court,c. 1840–60

In 1840 the South Australian judge Charles Cooper wrote an opinion in which he suggested that Aborigines who had not been in contact with British settlers were not within the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court. The resulting controversy led the Colonial Office to clarify its view on the subjecthood of Aborigines within the colony and the colonial courts' jurisdiction over all subjects in the colony. The criminal jurisdiction of the Supreme Court over Aborigines became politically important because it raised wider questions of imperial authority and colonial policy. By placing Cooper's views in a broader Australasian perspective, the formation of Colonial Office policy and the distinctions between legal categories that informed that policy may be better appreciated. Cooper continued to question the general application of Supreme Court jurisdiction to Aborigines into the late 1840s. This caused a clash with Lieutenant-Governor Robe, who felt that any weakness in the formal authority or jurisdiction of the courts threatened the ability of the government to implement effective policies.     

Bicameralism in Small States: The Experience of the Commonwealth Caribbean

Almost half of the bicameral legislatures in the Commonwealth are located in the Commonwealth Caribbean. Why so many bicameral legislatures are located in a relatively small geographic region, which is composed of countries that manifest characteristics more usually associated with unicameralism—small size, a unitary state, and homogeneity—is puzzling. Scholars have offered two possible explanations. The first concerns the presumed wish of the region’s political leaders upon independence to replicate the values and institutions of their colonial mentor, Britain. The second concerns the presumed need to prevent one-party dominance by guaranteeing the representation of opposition parties in the second chamber. This paper challenges both these explanations. By examining the origins of bicameralism in the region with the arrival of the first settlers in the seventeenth century, its demise during the era of crown colony rule in the nineteenth century, its renaissance in the 1950s and 1960s, and its survival in the post-independence era this paper will offer a more multi-layered explanation This entails taking account of the complex relationship between these former colonies and their imperial past, the wide range of views expressed both locally and within the Colonial Office about the suitability of bicameralism in the debates that accompanied the transition from colonial rule to independence, and, finally, the very distinctive nature of Caribbean bicameralism.