The penal colonies were modern experiments that attempted to resolve surplus British populations, achieve strategic and naval ambitions, and form new imperial markets. Metropolitan reformers were keenly interested in prison systems, writing speculative accounts and plans in response to early evidence from New South Wales. This chapter analyses major theories about the penal colonies and ‘systematic colonization’ by Jeremy Bentham and Edward Gibbon Wakefield, examining how evidence was drawn from colonial texts and repurposed for metropolitan interests. Alternative forms of information from the colonies were fed into metropolitan inquiries by the Quaker travellers James Backhouse and George Washington Walker. Quasi-official colonial experiments with convicts and prison reform trialled through the first half of the nineteenth century in many cases anticipated the prison reform underway in Britain. This chapter analyses the network of texts that brought metropolitan attention to bear on controversial aspects of convict transportation and colonial reform that reshaped ideas about society, crime, and punishment, with distinctive religious overtones, and how new models for reform emerged from colonial experiments.

This chapter uses the example of Fernando de Noronha (Brazil) to introduce the main theme of the book: the larger regional and global history of punitive mobility. It argues that its survival in the 1890s disrupts the dominant narrative of carceral history: the rise of the prison. It suggests that into this period convicts were sent long distances as unfree labour. This was due to a close and enduring connection between punishment and nation and empire building. Convicts satisfied geo-political and social ambitions, and were connected to colonization, resource extraction, and productivity. At the same time, it argues that punitive mobility is connected to the history of governance and repression. Further, it produced new kinds of classifications and social structures in which governments encouraged and nurtured family formation as a route to both convict reform and permanent settlement. Despite this, convict expertise made a vital contribution to the local practices and global circulations that together shaped contemporary scientific knowledge production and straddled nations and empires. Convicts and penal colonies occupy an important place in the making of the modern world, with respect not just to the history of punishment, but of governance, labour, nation and empire, and global knowledge exchange.