This chapter introduces the ‘empire of hell’, the name given to the British transportation system by the Irishman, John Mitchel. It argues that Mitchel’s politically motivated attack on transportation echoes that of popular representations of transportation, but that these owe more to the stereotype of ‘convict gothic’ and a taste for the macabre than to the complexity and variety of the British and Irish convict experience. It is time for a rethink about the place of religion in the history of convict transportation, using the tools of the new imperial religious history. It addresses three issues: the role of religion in the penal reform movement that began in the eighteenth century; the history of British and Irish convict transportation in the British empire from 1788; and the tempestuous historiography of British and Irish convict transportation and the anti-transportation movement. It outlines the thesis of this book, which traces the intellectual and religious elements of arguments about convict transportation from John Howard to John West.