Crime and punishment City’s convict trade
BRISTOL’S dark role in the transportation of tens of thousands of poor people convicted of crimes in the 18th and 19th centuries has been revealed in a new book by one of the city’s historians.
Empire of Hell explores the role religious leaders in the city and beyond played in setting up the convict trade, and later successfully campaigning for it to be scrapped.
The book has been written by Professor Hilary Carey, from the University of Bristol’s history department, who has engaged the help of her third year students in pulling together one of the first books of its kind exploring the relatively unknown subject.
The book looks in particular in at the West Country’s links with convict transportation, especially Matthew Blagdon Hale, a 19th century clergyman from Gloucestershire, who became the first Bishop of Perth in Australia, then retired and returned to Bristol to lead the campaign for the abolition of the convict trade.
Around 380,000 convicts were transported across the British Empire over the course of two centuries or more, with 160,000 people who had been convicted of crimes in the UK and Ireland transported during that time.
Often they may have been lowlevel crimes like stealing food, poaching or theft, and the practice was initially encouraged by powerful churchmen in England to prevent petty criminals being hanged, and as a way of rehabilitating them.
But after Hale went out and saw for himself the conditions the people transported had to endure – and the fact that it didn’t really work as a way of “saving” them – he returned to call for it to be stopped.
The book reveals Bristol has strong connections with the earlier history of transportation.
Following the Transportation Act of 1717, about 30,000 convicts were transported to the American colonies where their labour augmented that of slaves and indentured servants.
According to Bristol historian Kenneth Morgan, Bristol merchants shipped about a third of the convicts sent to Maryland before the trade was halted by the American War of Independence.
University of Bristol students are studying the convict trade as part of a third-year history unit on Convicts and the Colonies using the papers and research of Hale and Morgan.
“Bishop Hale was a notable figure in the anti-transportation campaign,” said a spokesperson for Bristol University.
“Besides his attempts to reform convict transportation, Hale campaigned for Aboriginal education and autonomy.
“Before heading to Perth, he argued that penal colonies were only justified if they reformed prisoners and brought prosperity to all. He was soon convinced that neither was likely in Western Australia.
“During her research for the book, Professor Carey made use of Hale’s personal papers, which are held by the University of Bristol’s Special Collections to study the way religious arguments were used to challenge government policy.
“Hale was not soft on crime and believed that penitents should acknowledge their faults.
“He notes in his journal, now in the Bristol library, that when he preached to 393 prisoners in the Fremantle Penitentiary on September 2, 1860, his text was Guilty before God.”
Professor Carey said the title of the book came from a quote from the Irish political prisoner John Mitchel, who was transported to Tasmania himself, after rebelling against the British rule during the Irish potato famine.
“British convict transportation was part of a global trade in convict labour practised by many European powers,” said Prof Carey.
“British and Irish convicts endured brutal conditions, but contemporaries observed that discipline was no worse than that inflicted in the army and navy.
“While the Irish political prisoner, John Mitchel, called the system an ‘Empire of Hell’, it was not the living death endured by slaves.
“Religious reformers and anticonvict transportation campaigners finally brought it to an end, partly because it was not seen as tough enough and served to demoralise rather than reform prisoners.”
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