Convicts

Abstract In 1858, the Edwin Fox departed Gravesend with a shipment of 280 convicts bound for a penal colony in Western Australia. Penal colonies have a long global history stretching back into the eighteenth century. Indeed, after the Transatlantic Slave Trade and the transportation of indentured laborers, the transportation of prisoners to various penal colonies throughout the world was the third largest form of unfree migration in human history. This chapter tells the story of this global system of punitive mobility, which sought to punish perceived criminals, extract valuable labor from unwilling bodies, managed populations both in the homeland and in sites of incarnation, and propelled imperial expansion and colonization. This chapter explores the background of the convicts onboard the Edwin Fox and traces their experiences after arriving in Western Australia. It situates these penal colonies within the story of nineteenth century globalization. It argues that remote colonies like Western Australia turned to penal colonialism as a strategy for integrating itself into global networks of trade, knowledge, and governance and that the nineteenth century carceral state reinforced and advanced the larger project of settler colonialism throughout the antipodes, with dire consequences for Indigenous populations there.