Final Report Summary - CARCHIPELAGO (The Carceral Archipelago: transnational circulations in global perspective, 1415-1960)
Key findings were:
• The mobility of convicts was more extensive that previously understood, and convicts travelled multi-directionally across empires.
• The large majority of convicts were young, fit men.
• Convict transportation cannot be detached from the labour desires of empires and nations.
• Prisons and penitentiaries did not replace other kinds of punishment in the modern era; convict transportation coexisted with them right up to the end of the 20th century. The peak of transportation was the 1890s, 60 years later than previously assumed.
• The lines between convict and other kinds of coerced labour were blurred; convicts were sometimes sold into indenture or enslavement, and indentured labourers and the enslaved could be subject to convict transportation. Convicts worked alongside indentured labour, the enslaved, soldiers and other kinds of labour.
• More non-European than European convicts were subject to penal transportation regimes. This overturns current assumptions.
• Convicts played a vital role in the production of modern scientific knowledge – as assistants to scientists or as subjects of experimentation.
• Penal transportation was connected to the exile of political offenders from the 15th century on. The ‘political prisoner’ is not a modern phenomenon, as has been argued.
• Whilst there were various legal routes into transportation, convicts shared experiences of punishment and penal labour.
• Convict transportation shaped landscape, environment, demography, economy and culture. There remain convict descendants in many modern nations, in the case of modern penal colonies they are self-consciously so.