In some of our recent writing (available freely here and here) and in some of our recent talks we have been arguing in favour of approaches to the history of convict transportation that started in the receiving destinations: the penal colonies. Our ambition was to move the focus of our attention away from flows of convicts from European centres (e.g. Britain and France) to penal colonies; and to look more towards flows of convicts between colonies.
At the time that we embarked on this work, it seemed extraordinary to us that because most work in this area had centred on understanding the practice and experience of Europeans, hugely important research areas had been entirely missed. For our own work, this included the c.8,000 prisoners from French Indochina transported around various sites in the French Empire, and the c.83,000 British Indian convicts sent to the Andaman Islands, a penal colony in the Bay of Bengal. Area studies historians knew about both phenomena, in greater or lesser detail, but neither had in any real sense been incorporated into larger histories of punishment and Empire. These histories remained rooted in understanding practices and experiences of convict mobility outwards from European ‘centres’ to colonial ‘peripheries’ and left many questions about the importance of penal colonies for colonial governance unanswered. Understanding when, how and why the colonies chose to send convicts into transportation was a big focus of our writing, a collection of which can be read freely here and here.
What also got lost the centring of Europe in histories of punishment and Empire were foundational moments in histories of migration and, in places like Australia and New Caledonia, settler colonialism. These include the use of Indian convicts from the late eighteenth century to build infrastructure in parts of what are today Singapore and Malaysia; the employment of Caribbean ex-convicts on the wharves and whaling ships of early nineteenth-century Tasmania; the replacement of enslaved labour in Indian Ocean households with Vietnamese prisoner servants after abolition in 1848; the reservation of the penal colony of French Guiana for African and Asian convicts for part of the nineteenth century; and the shipment of Algerian convicts to both French Guiana and New Caledonia. Australian historians were stunned, for example, to learn that it was neither New South Wales nor Van Diemen’s Land which received the largest number of convicts in the British Empire, but the British Indian penal colony of the Andaman Islands – albeit over a much longer period (and of course in aggregate the Australian colonies received more, around 167,000). (You can read the connected histories of the Australian and Andaman sites here).
There is also the question of what happened to these convicts after their transportation. Did they marry and have children? Encounter poverty and destitution? Manage to somehow create a viable life for themselves? What kind of relationships did they have with other convicts, including from their colony of origin, but also from Europe and other places? Were penal colonies organised along the lines of race and ethnicity, and how did this affect Asian, African and Creole convicts? For example, were they able to acquire land and property, and to pass assets down the generations? Or, did they face discrimination, and if so from whom?
When we began our work in 2021, it was these kinds of questions that we wanted to address. But as our research progresses, we are finding a far more networked picture than we had conceptualised in our original programme.
Convicts were often moved between colonial penal sites. For example, a Vietnamese prisoner might be deported to La Réunion in the Indian Ocean between Mauritius and Madagascar and subsequently sent on to French Guiana or even New Caledonia. This might be the result of a contagious disease in the original location, or participation in a penal insurrection, or several other factors might come into play. Each convict designated a French “matricule” number for prison identification might end up with as many as four or five allocated numbers from the different penal sites through which they transitioned. Sometimes a penal colony ended its usefulness, like the French colony of Obock in the Horn of Africa did by the end of the nineteenth century. As a result, the entire contingent of prisoners – from all over the French colonial world – was shipped en masse to French Guiana.
It was not just prisoners who entered these flows. Sometimes indentured workers were sentenced for crimes committed in the site of their indenture. Chinese indentured workers shipped to Réunion Island might enter the penal system through the courts of St Denis as the legal archives testify. From there, these newly minted prisoners could be sent on to French Guiana or New Caledonia creating new diasporic networks. There are parallels in British Mauritius, from where Indian indentured workers were transported as convicts to Van Diemen’s Land, sometimes moving on to other locations in Australia when their time was served.
Or, in marrying prisoners or free settlers from other locations in the French and British empires, convicts might create interwoven colonial lineages which descendants may choose to trace back. In later years, descendants of convicts might therefore travel between colonies or indeed to Europe. Descendant family trees spread their roots not just back to their familial natal lands but often to the centres of empire themselves. So, for example, we can trace families from St Laurent du Maroni on the banks of the Maroni River in French Guiana all the way “back” to the oceanic shores of southern France and the cosmopolitan port city of Marseilles.
If the point of departure is moved to the colonies themselves then the perspective, the lens of these journeys, becomes irrevocably changed. Carceral itineraries can thus be raised out of the footnotes and margins of colonial and penal history, and the profound influence and cultural legacies of these unwilling travellers/settlers of the trans-colonial globe be traced. Over the course of our project, we look forward to doing just that.
Clare Anderson and Lorraine Paterson