Criminal Transportation in the Atlantic World

For centuries, European states used criminal transportation as a mechanism not only to punish unruly offenders at home, but also to colonize new and distant territories, carry out military service in colonial settlements, and provide the necessary labor for state building in the Atlantic world. In the Americas, Europeans relied heavily on coerced labor from indigenous populations and imported unfree people, largely chattel slaves. Criminal transportation supplemented these efforts by banishing offenders to distant colonies under state supervision. Unlike African slaves whose enslavement became inheritable and perpetual, convicts facilitated colonial expansion by serving a term of service, and transportation also rid the metropole of unwanted elements. Criminal expulsion had its legal origins in Roman law, and major Western powers in Europe turned the process of banishment into a significant transportation system, one that allowed courts to deport criminals, rogues, vagrants, harlots, and military and political offenders deemed undesirable. The Portuguese shipped degredados (male criminals) to its Atlantic islands, including São Tomé, Príncipe, and São Martinho, as well as to its North African forts as early as the 15th century, and in the following century, authorities began deporting transportees to Brazil. The Portuguese abolished the imperial traffic in 1954, which made it the longest lived of the Atlantic criminal transportation systems. Out of all the European imperial powers, it is likely the British crown sent the highest number of convicts to its Atlantic colonies during the Early Modern period. Beginning in 1615, James I permitted judges to banish criminals to service the empire across the Atlantic. With the Transportation Act of 1718, the Crown used private companies to ship more than fifty thousand felons across the ocean, many of whom served as convict servants. The French also sent convicts to help colonize their New World in the 17th and 18th centuries, including the West Indies, Louisiana, and Canada, where they worked as laborers, soldiers, or in the galleys. In the 19th century, the French transformed French Guiana into a penal colony, which operated until the mid-20th century. Spain also used convicts in the North African presidios—fortified bases—in the Early Modern period. In the Americas, particularly in the second half of the 18th century, Spanish authorities deported offenders largely to work in Caribbean ports and fortresses. The system of transportation reflected shifting notions of state power, as contemporaries contested its legal and economic mechanisms as well as its moral and redemptive features for their societies and the convicts themselves. Newer scholarship seeks to expand our understanding of crime and punishment, penal reform, labor, imperial development, and associated cultural developments in an interconnected Atlantic world.

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