This analysis of female transports to Australia reveals their significant contribution to the new economy.

Global Convict Labour offers a global history of convict labour across many of the regimes of punishment that have appeared from Antiquity to the present, including transportation, prisons, workhouses and labour camps. The editors' essay surveys the available literature, and sets the theoretical basis to approach the issue. The fifteen chapters explore the genealogies of convict labour and its relationships with coloniality and governmentality. The volume re-establishes convict labour firmly within labour history, as one of the entangled, multiple labour relations that have punctuated human history. Similarly, it places convictism back within migration history at large, bridging the gap between the growing literature on convict transportation and research on slavery and other forms of free and bonded migration. Contributors are: Carlos Aguirre, David Arnold, Marc Buggeln, Timothy Coates, Christian G. De Vito, Mary Gibson, Miriam J. Groen-Vallinga, Stacey Hynd, Padraic Kenney, Alex Lichtenstein, Hamish Maxwell-Stewart, Alice Rio, Ricardo D. Salvatore, Jean-Lucien Sanchez, Pieter Spierenburg, Stephan Steiner, Laurens E. Tacoma, Heather Ann Thompson, Lynne Viola.

In this lively study of the development and transformation of voices of female offenders in nineteenth-century England, Anne Schwan analyzes a range of colorful sources, including crime broadsides, reform literature, prisoners' own writings about imprisonment and courtroom politics, and conventional literary texts, such as Adam Bede and The Moonstone. Not only does Schwan demonstrate strategies for interpreting ambivalent and often contradictory texts, she also provides a carefully historicized approach to the work of feminist recovery. Crossing class lines, genre boundaries, and gender roles in the effort to trace prisoners, authors, and female communities (imagined or real), Schwan brings new insight to what it means to locate feminist (or protofeminist) details, arguments, and politics. In this case, she tracks the emergence of a contested, and often contradictory, feminist consciousness, through the prism of nineteenth-century penal debates. The historical discussion is framed by reflections on contemporary debates about prisoner perspectives to illuminate continuities and differences. Convict Voices offers a sophisticated approach to interpretive questions of gender, genre, and discourse in the representation of female convicts and their voices and viewpoints.

The 'Neva' sailed from Cork on 8 January 1835, destined for the prisons of Botany Bay. There were 240 people on board, most of them either female convicts or the wives of already deported convicts, and their children. On 13 May 1835 the ship hit a reef just north of King's Island in Australia and sank with the loss of 224 lives - one of the worst shipwrecks in maritime history. The authors have comprehensively researched sources in Ireland, Australia and the UK to reconstruct in fascinating detail the stories of these women. Most perished beneath the ocean waves, but for others the journey from their poverty stricken and criminal pasts continued towards hope of freedom and prosperity on the far side of the world. At a time when Australia is once again becoming a new home for a generation of migrating Irish, it is appropriate that the formative historical links between the two countries be remembered.

This is a story lost to history for over two hundred years; a dirty secret of failure, fatal misjudgement and desperate measures which the British Empire chose to forget almost as soon as it was over. In the wake of its most crushing defeat, the America War of Independence, the British Government began shipping its criminals to West Africa. Some were transported aboard ships going to pick up their other human cargo: African slaves. When they arrived at their destination, soldiers and even convicts were forced to work in the region's slave-trading forts guarding the human merchandise. In a few short years the scheme brought death, wholesale desertions, mutiny, piracy and even murder. Some of the most egregious crimes were not committed by the exported criminals but by those sent out to guard them. Acts of wanton desperation added to rash transgressions as those whom society had already thrown out realised that they had nothing left to lose. As jail and prison hulks overflowed, and as every other alternative settlement proved unsuitable, the British Government gambled and decided to send its criminals as far away as possible, to the great south land sighted years before by Captain James Cook. Out of the embers of the African debacle came the modern nation of Australia. The extraordinary tale is now being told for the first time - how a small band of good-for-nothing members of the British Empire spanned the world from America, to Africa, and on to Australia, profoundly if utterly unwittingly changing history.

When the British took control of the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius soon after the abolition of the slave trade, they were faced with a labour-hungry and potentially hostile Franco-Mauritian plantocracy. This book explores the context in which Indian convicts were transported to the island and put to work building the infrastructure necessary to fuel the expansion of the sugar industry. Drawing on hitherto unexplored archival material, it is shown how convicts experienced transportation and integrated into the Mauritian social and economic fabric.

Australia is one of the most ethnically diverse societies in the world today. From its ancient indigenous origins to British colonisation followed by waves of European then international migration in the twentieth century, the island continent is home to people from all over the globe. Each new wave of settlers has had a profound impact on Australian society and culture. The Australian People documents the dramatic history of Australian settlement and describes the rich ethnic and cultural inheritance of the nation through the contributions of its people. It is one of the largest reference works of its kind, with approximately 250 expert contributors and almost one million words. Illustrated in colour and black and white, the book is both a comprehensive encyclopedia and a survey of the controversial debates about citizenship and multiculturalism now that Australia has attained the centenary of its federation.

Drawing on digital criminal records, this book traces the life courses of young convicts who were sentenced at the Old Bailey and transported to Van Diemen's Land in the early 19th century. It explores the everyday lives of the convicts pre- and post-transportation, focusing on their crimes, punishments, education, employment and family life right up to their deaths. Emma D. Watkins contextualizes these young convicts within the punishment system, economy and culture that they were thrust into by their forced movement to Australia. This allows an understanding of the factors which determined their chances of achieving a 'settled life' away from crime in the colony. Packed with case studies offering vivid accounts of the offenders' lives, Life Courses of Young Convicts Transported to Van Diemen's Land makes an important contribution to the history of transportation, social history and Australian history.

This extensive Handbook addresses a range of contemporary issues related to Prison Tourism across the world. It is divided into seven sections: Ethics, Human Rights and Penal Spectatorship; Carceral Retasking, Curation and Commodification of Punishment; Meanings of Prison Life and Representations of Punishment in Tourism Sites; Death and Torture in Prison Museums; Colonialism, Relics of Empire and Prison Museums; Tourism and Operational Prisons; and Visitor Consumption and Experiences of Prison Tourism. The Handbook explores global debates within the field of Prison Tourism inquiry; spanning a diverse range of topics from political imprisonment and persecution in Taiwan to interpretive programming in Alcatraz, and the representation of incarcerated Indigenous peoples to prison graffiti. This Handbook is the first to present a thorough examination of Prison Tourism that is truly global in scope. With contributions from both well-renowned scholars and up-and-coming researchers in the field, from a wide variety of disciplines, the Handbook comprises an international collection at the cutting edge of Prison Tourism studies. Students and teachers from disciplines ranging from Criminology to Cultural Studies will find the text invaluable as the definitive work in the field of Prison Tourism.

It is often asserted that the ruling elite in Western capitalist economies now consists of liberal intellectuals and their media sympathisers. By contrast this book looks at the real elite in Australian and New Zealand society and shows that there is still a ruling class based upon economic dominance. From an analysis of corporate and public records, interviews, and other primary and secondary data, it develops a picture of networks of power that are changing but are as real as any network in the past.