Perish or prosper : the law and convict transportation in the British Empire, 1700-1850

For over 150 years from the early eighteenth century, convict transportation was a primary method of punishing serious crime in Britain and Ireland. If the decision did apply in the penal colony, a person transported for seven years, say, would remain attainted until the seven years expired, regardless of an informal colonial pardon or the grant of a ticket of leave. These acts did nothing for the other, greater problem: a penal colony was now subject to the whole of the law of attaint. The British Parliament finally reconciled imperial law and New South Wales practice in 1843, after convict transportation to the mainland of the colony effectively ended in 1840. Right to the end of transportation to New South Wales, Dowling emphasized the master's property in convict services and its importance for the development of the colony and rehabilitation of the offender. Yet the British Parliament eventually insisted on imposing the law of attaint, egged on by the exclusive cause, those who wished the convict stain to be permanent. Was it a penal colony with a few free settlers, or an ordinary Crown colony in which transportation was incidental? Was transportation essentially exile, or was it a sentence analogous to imprisonment in a penitentiary? Was convict service essential to the imperial scheme, or merely incidental as it had been in America?58 page(s