A Merciless Place The Lost Story Of Britains Convict Disaster In Africa

Author : Emma Christopher
Publisher : OUP Oxford
ISBN 13 : 0191623520
Total Pages : 454 pages
Book Rating : 4.23/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A Merciless Place: The Lost Story of Britain's Convict Disaster in Africa written by Emma Christopher and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2011-08-11 with total page 454 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Emma Christopher
Publisher : Allen & Unwin
ISBN 13 : 1742372279
Total Pages : 470 pages
Book Rating : 4.73/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A Merciless Place written by Emma Christopher and published by Allen & Unwin. This book was released on 2010 with total page 470 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, the author has found the 'missing link' between the American Revolution and The Fatal Shore, and tells the extraordinary story - lost for two centuries - of how a failed British attempt to establish a penal colony in West Africa led to their eventual decision to abandon their African plans and establish a new colony in the recently discovered colony known as New South Wales.

Author : Emma Christopher
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN 13 : 0199843759
Total Pages : 440 pages
Book Rating : 4.56/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A Merciless Place: The Fate of Britain's Convicts after the American Revolution written by Emma Christopher and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2011-06-03 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since Robert Hughes' The Fatal Shore, the fate of British convicts has burned brightly in the popular imagination. Incredibly, their larger story is even more dramatic--the saga of forgotten men and women scattered to the farthest corners of the British empire, driven by the winds of the American Revolution and the currents of the African slave trade. In A Merciless Place, Emma Christopher brilliantly captures this previously unknown story of poverty, punishment, and transportation. The story begins with the American War of Independence, until which many British convicts were shipped across the Atlantic. The Revolution interrupted this flow and inspired two entrepreneurs to organize the criminals into military units to fight for the crown. The felon soldiers went to West Africa's slave-trading posts just as the war ended; these forts became the new destination for England's rapidly multiplying convicts. The move was a disaster. Christopher writes that "before the scheme was abandoned, it would have run the gamut of piracy, treachery, mutiny, starvation, poisonings, allegations of white women forced to prostitute themselves to African men, and not least several cases of murder." To end the scandal, the British government chose a new destination, as far away as possible: Australia. Christopher here captures the gritty lives of Britain's convicts: victims of London's underworld, rife with brutal crime and sometimes even more brutal punishments. Equally fascinating are the portraits of Fante people of West Africa, forced to undergo dramatic changes in their role as intermediaries with Europeans in the slave trade. Here, too, are the aboriginal Australians, coping with the transformation of their native land. They all inhabit A Merciless Place: a tour de force and historical narrative at its finest.

Author : Clare Anderson
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 135000068X
Total Pages : 409 pages
Book Rating : 4.81/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A Global History of Convicts and Penal Colonies written by Clare Anderson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-05-17 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between 1415, when the Portuguese first used convicts for colonization purposes in the North African enclave of Ceuta, to the 1960s and the dissolution of Stalin's gulags, global powers including the Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, British, Russians, Chinese and Japanese transported millions of convicts to forts, penal settlements and penal colonies all over the world. A Global History of Convicts and Penal Colonies builds on specific regional archives and literatures to write the first global history of penal transportation. The essays explore the idea of penal transportation as an engine of global change, in which political repression and forced labour combined to produce long-term impacts on economy, society and identity. They investigate the varied and interconnected routes convicts took to penal sites across the world, and the relationship of these convict flows to other forms of punishment, unfree labour, military service and indigenous incarceration. They also explore the lived worlds of convicts, including work, culture, religion and intimacy, and convict experience and agency.

Author :
Publisher : BRILL
ISBN 13 : 9004285024
Total Pages : 521 pages
Book Rating : 4.26/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Global Convict Labour written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2015-06-24 with total page 521 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Global Convict Labour, nineteen contributors offer a global and comparative history of convict labour across many of the regimes of punishment that have appeared from the Antiquity to the present.

Author : Tim Causer
Publisher : UCL Press
ISBN 13 : 1911576828
Total Pages : 206 pages
Book Rating : 4.22/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Memorandoms by James Martin written by Tim Causer and published by UCL Press. This book was released on 2017-06-07 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Among the vast body of manuscripts composed and collected by the philosopher and reformer Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), held by UCL Library’s Special Collections, is the earliest Australian convict narrative, Memorandoms by James Martin. This document also happens to be the only extant first-hand account of the most well-known, and most mythologized, escape from Australia by transported convicts. On the night of 28 March 1791, James Martin, William and Mary Bryant and their two infant children, and six other male convicts, stole the colony’s fishing boat and sailed out of Sydney Harbour. Within ten weeks they had reached Kupang in West Timor, having, in an amazing feat of endurance, travelled over 3,000 miles (c. 5,000) kilometres) in an open boat. There they passed themselves off as the survivors of a shipwreck, a ruse which—initially, at least—fooled their Dutch hosts. This new edition of the Memorandoms includes full colour reproductions of the original manuscripts, making available for the first time this hugely important document, alongside a transcript with commentary describing the events and key characters. The book also features a scholarly introduction which examines their escape and early convict absconding in New South Wales more generally, and, drawing on primary records, presents new research which sheds light on the fate of the escapees after they reached Kupang. The introduction also assesses the voluminous literature on this most famous escape, and critically examines the myths and fictions created around it and the escapees, myths which have gone unchallenged for far too long. Finally, the introduction briefly discusses Jeremy Bentham’s views on convict transportation and their enduring impact.

Author : Lucy Williams
Publisher : Casemate Publishers
ISBN 13 : 1526718391
Total Pages : 286 pages
Book Rating : 4.96/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Convicts in the Colonies written by Lucy Williams and published by Casemate Publishers. This book was released on 2018-09-30 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A book that looks deeply into the lives of some of the convicts who were sentenced in court to be transported to Botany Bay.” —Pirates and Privateers In the eighty years between 1787 and 1868 more than 160,000 men, women and children convicted of everything from picking pockets to murder were sentenced to be transported beyond the seas. These convicts were destined to serve out their sentences in the empires most remote colony: Australia. Through vivid real-life case studies and famous tales of the exceptional and extraordinary, Convicts in the Colonies narrates the history of convict transportation to Australia—from the first to the final fleet. Using the latest original research, Convicts in the Colonies reveals a fascinating century-long history of British convicts unlike any other. Covering everything from crime and sentencing in Britain and the perilous voyage to Australia, to life in each of the three main penal colonies—New South Wales, Van Diemen’s Land, and Western Australia—this book charts the lives and experiences of the men and women who crossed the world and underwent one of the most extraordinary punishments in history. “An easily read, fascinating history, telling the tales of the ‘recidivist’ convicts in the 18th and 19th centuries.” —The Essex Family Historian

Author : Graham Seal
Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 0300256221
Total Pages : 309 pages
Book Rating : 4.22/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Condemned written by Graham Seal and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2021-05-18 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A powerful account of how coerced migration built the British Empire In the early seventeenth century, Britain took ruthless steps to deal with its unwanted citizens, forcibly removing men, women, and children from their homelands and sending them to far-flung corners of the empire to be sold off to colonial masters. This oppressive regime grew into a brutal system of human bondage which would continue into the twentieth century. Drawing on firsthand accounts, letters, and official documents, Graham Seal uncovers the traumatic struggles of those shipped around the empire. He shows how the earliest large-scale kidnapping and transportation of children to the American colonies were quickly bolstered with shipments of the poor, criminal, and rebellious to different continents, including Australia. From Asia to Africa, this global trade in forced labor allowed Britain to build its colonies while turning a considerable profit. Incisive and moving, this account brings to light the true extent of a cruel strand in the history of the British Empire.

Author : Paul Longley Arthur
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 131796716X
Total Pages : 170 pages
Book Rating : 4.63/5 ( download)

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Download or read book International Life Writing written by Paul Longley Arthur and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-31 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Representing the best of international life writing scholarship, this collection reveals extraordinary stories of remarkable lives. These wide-ranging accounts span the Americas, Britain, Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia and the Pacific over a period of more than two centuries. Showing fascinating connections between people, places and historical eras, they unfold against the backdrop of events and social movements of global significance that have influenced the world in which we live today. Many of the authors document and celebrate lives that have been lost, hidden or neglected. They are reconstituted from the archives, restored through testimony and reimagined through art. The effects of colonialism, war and conflict on individual lives can be seen throughout the book alongside themes of transnational connection, displacement and exile, migration of individuals, families and peoples, and recovery and recuperation through memory and writing, creativity and performance. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Life Writing.

Author : Clare Anderson
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1108888569
Total Pages : 493 pages
Book Rating : 4.61/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Convicts written by Clare Anderson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-01-13 with total page 493 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Clare Anderson provides a radical new reading of histories of empire and nation, showing that the history of punishment is not connected solely to the emergence of prisons and penitentiaries, but to histories of governance, occupation, and global connections across the world. Exploring punitive mobility to islands, colonies, and remote inland and border regions over a period of five centuries, she proposes a close and enduring connection between punishment, governance, repression, and nation and empire building, and reveals how states, imperial powers, and trading companies used convicts to satisfy various geo-political and social ambitions. Punitive mobility became intertwined with other forms of labour bondage, including enslavement, with convicts a key source of unfree labour that could be used to occupy territories. Far from passive subjects, however, convicts manifested their agency in various forms, including the extension of political ideology and cultural transfer, and vital contributions to contemporary knowledge production.