Final Report Summary - CARCHIPELAGO (The Carceral Archipelago: transnational circulations in global perspective, 1415-1960)
The multi-disciplinary Carceral Archipelago project produced the first global history of convicts and penal colonies. It covered the period from 1415, when the Portuguese Empire first used convicts for colonization purposes in North Africa, to the dissolution of the Soviet gulags in the 1960s. The project quantified for the first time the global scale of convict transportation, and mapped for the first time its geographical reach and complexity.
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.
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.