Locating penal transportation: punishment, space and place c. 1750-1900

Each penal regime shapes its own spatial configurations, and space also shapes the character of penal regimes. The historical study of this mutual influence opens up for interrogation the “usable past” of carceral geography. For, even as the specific ways in which space and punishment intertwine change over time, their connections remain a fundamental feature of penality in the modern world. This chapter explores these points in a context in which spatiality is perhaps most explicit: convict transportation. Arguably, this penal regime had an even more intimate relationship with spatiality than prisons did, as it bound together convict circulations and geographical contexts through spatial isolation and interconnectedness. Moreover, the routes of convict transportation often intertwined with other forced labour flows, as well as African enslavement. The existence of such “scales” of incarceration, migration and unfree labour were a recurrent feature of transportation across imperial geographies, well into the twentieth century (Anderson and Maxwell-Stewart, 2014; De Vito and Lichtenstein, 2013, forthcoming). [Taken from Introduction]