This chapter underscores the central arguments of this volume by emphasizing the need for a simultaneous analysis of multiple flows of forced migrations. Focusing on the 1790s, it first looks at the transportation of convicts, vagrants, and deserters from Peninsular Spain and the Northern African presidios to the garrisons and the military outposts of Spanish America. Then it examines the flows of war captives, refugees, and convicts that originated from the Haitian Revolution and spread out across the Spanish Caribbean. The concluding section reflects on continuities and discontinuities in the regimes of punitive relocations in the Spanish Empire in the Early Modern period and the nineteenth century. From this perspective, the chapter suggests the need for an integrated study of all punitive relocations and for the investigation of those processes whereby the “political” nature of punishment and the punished was construed or marginalized.

The introduction showcases colonial officials, missionaries and natural history collectors who, alongside Indigenous interlocutors and metropolitan advocates, sought to collect and use Antipodean information. Three key fields of knowledge emerged from the Australian colonies, and they reveal the relationship between knowledge formation and print culture. Part 1, Imagining Settler Humanitarianism, examines key debates about convictism, race and morality. Part 2, Regulating Settler Society, focuses on convictism and the forms of knowledge about reforming the self and regulating society that emerged from penal experiments. Part 3, Inventing Settler Science, shows how the scientific novelty of the Australian colonies attracted attention from the Endeavour voyage onwards, and inaugurated networks of correspondence, collection and publication that struggled to account for the Indigenous knowledge and participation that characterised the colonies.

The conclusion draws together the threads of the three key fields of colonial knowledge and shows some of the later trajectories of these rich archives. Australian data proved central to key ideas that were fomented during the nineteenth century, and which continue to affect contemporary society. Debates about civilisational orders, and about the role of science and religion in relation to the extension of imperial power and economic privilege, were widespread. The distinctive nature of the Australian colonial experiment continues to make important contributions to global debates about the history of humanitarianism and human rights, apologies and reparations sought by colonised and displaced peoples for the wrongs of imperialism and colonial governance, and the uneven distribution of wealth, up to the twenty-first century.

This chapter analyses the diverse textual sources emanating from Norfolk Island, which were captured in colonial and imperial archives, to explore how metropolitan ideas could be trialled in remote colonial Australian locales, brought into metropolitan inquiries, then circulated through imperial print culture. Ambitious and curious men such as Alexander Maconochie saw the Australian colonies as opportunities for personal advancement and intellectual endeavour. He experimented with prison reform in Tasmania, then was appointed as Commandant at Norfolk Island, where he both implemented and wrote his new ‘mark system’ of prison management. On his return to Britain, Maconochie produced multiple publications promoting his scheme. He appeared before governmental inquiries to defend his reputation and extend his influence; and in so doing inaugurated many of the foundational modern principles of penology. Maconochie also encouraged prisoners to write, and thus a rich archive of convict memoirs emerged from Norfolk Island, including those by James Lawrence and William Henry Barber. These connected with progressive publishers, such as Thomas Chambers, and writers such as Charles Dickens, who included convict voices and narratives in their metropolitan publications and built public support for the end of transportation.

The performance of Edward Young’s The Revenge in Sydney in 1796 is used as a way to recast British-Aboriginal relations in the early years of the British invasion. Sydney became an amphitheater of struggle over contending claims of British and Aboriginal authorities, Eora clans who refused to give up their lands, exiled British felons of all sexes enraged at their fates, soldiers and sailors who bewailed their exile: revenge was on many people’s minds. How was The Revenge going to be interpreted in such a setting, by such a multitude?

This chapter uses the example of Fernando de Noronha (Brazil) to introduce the main theme of the book: the larger regional and global history of punitive mobility. It argues that its survival in the 1890s disrupts the dominant narrative of carceral history: the rise of the prison. It suggests that into this period convicts were sent long distances as unfree labour. This was due to a close and enduring connection between punishment and nation and empire building. Convicts satisfied geo-political and social ambitions, and were connected to colonization, resource extraction, and productivity. At the same time, it argues that punitive mobility is connected to the history of governance and repression. Further, it produced new kinds of classifications and social structures in which governments encouraged and nurtured family formation as a route to both convict reform and permanent settlement. Despite this, convict expertise made a vital contribution to the local practices and global circulations that together shaped contemporary scientific knowledge production and straddled nations and empires. Convicts and penal colonies occupy an important place in the making of the modern world, with respect not just to the history of punishment, but of governance, labour, nation and empire, and global knowledge exchange.

The long-running dispute among historians over the purpose of Britain’s new colony is beset by contradiction. If it was to serve as a naval base, why did the imperial authorities give strict instructions not to establish a shipyard? How could it function as a trading post when the East India Company had a monopoly on all trade in the Indian-Pacific? And if it was to appraise flax and timber, why did the First Fleet carry no botanist or gardener? Equally, the claim that Botany Bay was to be no more than a dumping ground for convicts overlooks the careful design of this new venture. It was to be a place of exile where convicts would work on the land under close supervision for the duration of their sentences and then on small plots of their own to meet their needs. The First Fleet thus marked the beginning of a new penal system in which the prospect of transportation to the other side of the world would deter crime and hard work would reform criminals, so that as peasant proprietors they would form the basis of a new society.

In Australia, Irish and Catholic are virtually synonymous. In the eastern states, Irish Catholics often comprised nearly a third of the population and rarely less than a quarter. Irish nuns, priests, bishops, and laity shaped the country almost from the beginning. This chapter traces the development of Irish, and Irish Catholic, Australia across the continent from the early 1800s to Federation and beyond.