Empire of chains

CLARE ANDERSON embarks on a lively journey through a series of convict tales that shed new light on centuries of penal transportation across the British empire

- CLARE ANDERSON

Condemned: The Transported Men, Women and Children Who Built Britain’s Empire by Graham Seal Yale University Press, 296 pages, £20

The human and cultural dimensions of penal transportation are the focus of this “collective biography” of convicts sent overseas to Britain’s imperial possessions.

Some of these convicts were transported following judicial process. In the period before the arrival of the First Fleet in Botany Bay in 1788, though, others were kidnapped, inveigled or otherwise sent extrajudicially to North America and the Caribbean. According to author Graham Seal, over the four centuries in which the policy was in force, there developed a strong association between poverty and transportation. Alongside dissenters and political enemies, this system came also to ensnare vagrants, idlers, thieves, sex workers, orphans and others in what Seal calls an “empire of chains”.

Condemned explores this association, taking readers on a series of journeys alongside a cast of “colourful characters”. Through recently published work that has mapped penal transportation across the entirety of the British empire, some of these people are already well known. They include Elizabeth Wynn and Magdalene Dutton who, in the 1620s, were reprieved from the gallows and ordered to travel to Guiana with colonial speculators – though it is unclear whether they ever made it to South America.