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The Transatlantic Market for British Convict Labor

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 July 2012

Farley Grubb
Farley Grubb
Affiliation:
Farley Grubb is Professor, Department of Economics, University of Delaware, Newark, DE 19716. E-mail: [email protected].
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Extract

Convicts account for at least one-quarter of British migration to mid-eighteenth-century America. Their transportation to and disposal in America was essentially an experiment in privatizing post-trial criminal justice. A model of this trade is developed that yields testable implications regarding the relative distributional moments of convict auction prices, the size of shipper profits, and how convicts were selected for transportation.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 60 , Issue 1 , March 2000 , pp. 94 - 122
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 2000

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