A Merciless Place The Lost Story Of Britain S Convict Disaster In Africa

A Merciless Place The Lost Story Of Britain S Convict Disaster In Africa Book in PDF, ePub and Kindle version is available to download in english. Read online anytime anywhere directly from your device. Click on the download button below to get a free pdf file of A Merciless Place The Lost Story Of Britain S Convict Disaster In Africa book. This book definitely worth reading, it is an incredibly well-written.

A Merciless Place: The Lost Story of Britain's Convict Disaster in Africa

Author : Emma Christopher
Publisher : OUP Oxford
Page : 454 pages
File Size : 53,5 Mb
Release : 2011-08-11
Category : History
ISBN : 9780191623523

Get Book

A Merciless Place: The Lost Story of Britain's Convict Disaster in Africa by Emma Christopher Pdf

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.

A Merciless Place

Author : Emma Christopher
Publisher : Allen & Unwin
Page : 469 pages
File Size : 52,6 Mb
Release : 2010
Category : History
ISBN : 9781742691381

Get Book

A Merciless Place by Emma Christopher Pdf

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.

The Story of Australia

Author : Louise C Johnson,Tanja Luckins,David Walker
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 230 pages
File Size : 53,8 Mb
Release : 2021-09-02
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781000423396

Get Book

The Story of Australia by Louise C Johnson,Tanja Luckins,David Walker Pdf

The Story of Australia provides a fresh, engaging and comprehensive introduction to Australia’s history and geography. An island continent with distinct physical features, Australia is home to the most enduring Indigenous cultures on the planet. In the late eighteenth century newcomers from distant worlds brought great change. Since that time, Australia has been shaped by many peoples with competing visions of what the future might hold. This new history of Australia integrates a rich body of scholarship from many disciplines, drawing upon maps, novels, poetry, art, music, diaries and letters, government and scientific reports, newspapers, architecture and the land itself, engaging with Australia in its historical, geographical, national and global contexts. It pays particular attention to women and Indigenous Australians, as well as exploring key themes including invasion/colonisation, land use, urbanisation, war, migration, suburbia and social movements for change. Elegantly written, readers will enjoy Australia’s story from its origins to the present as the nation seeks to resolve tensions between Indigenous dispossession, British tradition and multicultural diversity while finding its place in an Asian region and dealing with global challenges like climate change. It is an ideal text for students, academics and general readers with an interest in Australian history, geography, politics and culture.

A Merciless Place: The Fate of Britain's Convicts after the American Revolution

Author : Emma Christopher
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
Page : 440 pages
File Size : 43,8 Mb
Release : 2011-06-03
Category : History
ISBN : 9780199843756

Get Book

A Merciless Place: The Fate of Britain's Convicts after the American Revolution by Emma Christopher Pdf

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.

Memorandoms by James Martin

Author : Tim Causer
Publisher : UCL Press
Page : 206 pages
File Size : 43,7 Mb
Release : 2017-06-07
Category : History
ISBN : 9781911576822

Get Book

Memorandoms by James Martin by Tim Causer Pdf

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.

International Life Writing

Author : Paul Longley Arthur
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 170 pages
File Size : 53,6 Mb
Release : 2013-10-31
Category : Literary Collections
ISBN : 9781317967163

Get Book

International Life Writing by Paul Longley Arthur Pdf

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.

Condemned

Author : Graham Seal
Publisher : Yale University Press
Page : 309 pages
File Size : 53,5 Mb
Release : 2021-05-18
Category : History
ISBN : 9780300256222

Get Book

Condemned by Graham Seal Pdf

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.

Birthplace, Migration and Crime

Author : Ronald D. Francis
Publisher : Springer
Page : 285 pages
File Size : 42,7 Mb
Release : 2014-03-26
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781137386489

Get Book

Birthplace, Migration and Crime by Ronald D. Francis Pdf

An historical and contemporary account of migrant crime in Australia, this book explores a range of issues from mental health and victimology to immigration policy and legal analysis, arguing that it is birthplace, not race, which impacts upon crimes committed by migrants.

A Global History of Convicts and Penal Colonies

Author : Clare Anderson
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Page : 409 pages
File Size : 46,7 Mb
Release : 2018-05-17
Category : History
ISBN : 9781350000681

Get Book

A Global History of Convicts and Penal Colonies by Clare Anderson Pdf

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.

Against the Death Penalty

Author : CESARE. PELLI BECCARIA (GIUSEPPIE. BECCARIA, CESARE.),Giuseppie Pelli
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 232 pages
File Size : 50,6 Mb
Release : 2024-06-04
Category : Capital punishment
ISBN : 9780691211947

Get Book

Against the Death Penalty by CESARE. PELLI BECCARIA (GIUSEPPIE. BECCARIA, CESARE.),Giuseppie Pelli Pdf

In 1764, a Milanese aristocrat named Cesare Beccaria created a sensation when he published On Crimes and Punishments. At its centre is a rejection of the death penalty as excessive, unnecessary, and pointless. Beccaria is deservedly regarded as the founding father of modern criminal law reform, yet he was not the first to argue for the abolition of the death penalty. This book presents the first English translation of the Florentine aristocrat Giuseppe Pelli's critique of capital punishment, written three years before Beccaria's treatise, but lost for more than two centuries in the Pelli family archives. The book examines the contrasting arguments of the two abolitionists, who drew from different intellectual traditions.

Cultural Histories of Law, Media and Emotion

Author : Katie Barclay,Amy Milka
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 291 pages
File Size : 48,7 Mb
Release : 2022-07-21
Category : History
ISBN : 9781000619539

Get Book

Cultural Histories of Law, Media and Emotion by Katie Barclay,Amy Milka Pdf

Cultural Histories of Law, Media and Emotion: Public Justice explores how the legal history of long-eighteenth-century Britain has been transformed by the cultural turn, and especially the associated history of emotion. Seeking to reflect on the state of the field, 13 essays by leading and emerging scholars bring cutting-edge research to bear on the intersections between law, print culture and emotion in Britain across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Divided into three sections, this collection explores the ‘public’ as a site of legal sensibility; it demonstrates how the rhetoric of emotion constructed the law in legal practice and in society and culture; and it highlights how approaches from cultural and emotions history have recentred the individual, the biography and the group to explain long-running legal-historical problems. Across this volume, authors evidence how engagements between cultural and legal history have revitalised our understanding of law’s role in eighteenth-century culture and society, not least deepening our understanding of justice as produced with and through the public. This volume is the ideal resource for upper-level undergraduates, postgraduates and scholars interested in the history of emotions as well as the legal history of Britain from the late seventeenth to the nineteenth century.

Anti-Slavery and Australia

Author : Jane Lydon
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 307 pages
File Size : 43,6 Mb
Release : 2021-03-15
Category : History
ISBN : 9780429817335

Get Book

Anti-Slavery and Australia by Jane Lydon Pdf

Bringing the histories of British anti-slavery and Australian colonization together changes our view of both. This book explores the anti-slavery movement in imperial scope, arguing that colonization in Australasia facilitated emancipation in the Caribbean, even as abolition powerfully shaped the Settler Revolution. The anti-slavery campaign was deeply entwined with the administration of the empire and its diverse peoples, as well as the radical changes demanded by industrialization and rapid social change in Britain. Abolition posed problems to which colonial expansion provided the answer, intimately linking the end of slavery to systematic colonization and Indigenous dispossession. By defining slavery in the Caribbean as the opposite of freedom, a lasting impact of abolition was to relegate other forms of oppression to lesser status, or to deny them. Through the shared concerns of abolitionists, slave-owners, and colonizers, a plastic ideology of ‘free labour’ was embedded within post-emancipation imperialist geopolitics, justifying the proliferation of new forms of unfree labour and defining new racial categories. The celebration of abolition has overshadowed post-emancipation continuities and transformations of slavery that continue to shape the modern world.

Historical Geographies of Prisons

Author : Karen M. Morin,Dominique Moran
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 280 pages
File Size : 43,9 Mb
Release : 2015-06-12
Category : Science
ISBN : 9781317532613

Get Book

Historical Geographies of Prisons by Karen M. Morin,Dominique Moran Pdf

This is the first book to provide a comprehensive historical-geographical lens to the development and evolution of correctional institutions as a specific subset of carceral geographies. This book analyzes and critiques global practices of incarceration, regimes of punishment, and their corresponding spaces of "corrections" from the eighteenth to twenty-first centuries. It examines individuals' experiences within various regulatory regimes and spaces of punishment, and offers an interpretation of spaces of incarceration as cultural-historical artifacts. The book also analyzes the spatial-distributional geographies of incarceration, particularly with respect to their historical impact on community political-economic development and local geographies. Contributions within this book examine a range of prison sites and the practices that take place within them to help us understand how regimes of punishment are experienced, and are constructed in different kinds of ways across space and time for very different ends. The overall aim of this book is to help understand the legacies of carceral geographies in the present. The resonances across space and time tell a profound story of social and spatial legacies and, as such, offer important insights into the prison crisis we see in many parts of the world today.

Transnational Penal Cultures

Author : Vivien Miller,James Campbell
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 250 pages
File Size : 49,7 Mb
Release : 2014-11-13
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781317807209

Get Book

Transnational Penal Cultures by Vivien Miller,James Campbell Pdf

Focusing on three key stages of the criminal justice process, discipline, punishment and desistance, and incorporating case studies from Asia, the Americas, Europe, Africa and Australia, the thirteen chapters in this collection are based on exciting new research that explores the evolution and adaptation of criminal justice and penal systems, largely from the early nineteenth century to the present. They range across the disciplinary boundaries of History, Criminology, Law and Penology. Journeying into and unlocking different national and international penal archives, and drawing on diverse analytical approaches, the chapters forge new connections between historical and contemporary issues in crime, prisons, policing and penal cultures, and challenge traditional Western democratic historiographies of crime and punishment and categorisations of offenders, police and ex-offenders. The individual chapters provide new perspectives on race, gender, class, urban space, surveillance, policing, prisonisation and defiance, and will be essential reading for academics and students engaged in the study of criminal justice, law, police, transportation, slavery, offenders and desistance from crime.

Penal Servitude

Author : Helen Johnston,Barry Godfrey,David J. Cox
Publisher : McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Page : 160 pages
File Size : 53,5 Mb
Release : 2022-01-15
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780228009665

Get Book

Penal Servitude by Helen Johnston,Barry Godfrey,David J. Cox Pdf

Established in 1853, after the end of penal transportation to Australia, the convict prison system and the sentence of penal servitude offered the most severe form of punishment – short of death – in the criminal justice system, and they remained in place for nearly a century. Penal Servitude is the first comprehensive study to examine the convict prison system that housed all those who were sentenced to penal servitude during this time. Helen Johnston, Barry Godfrey, and David Cox detail the administration and evolution of the system, from its creation in the 1850s and the building of the prison estate to the classification of prisoners within it. Exploring life in the convict prison through the experiences of the people who were subjected to it, the authors shed light on various details such as prison diet, education, and labour. What they find reveals the internal regimes; the everyday endurances, conformity, resistance, and rule breaking of convicts; and the interactions with the warders, medical officers, and governors that shaped daily life in the system. Reconstructing the life histories of hundreds of convict prisoners from detailed prison records, criminal registers, census data, and personal correspondence, Penal Servitude illuminates the lives of those who experienced long-term imprisonment in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.