Criminal Servitude, Authority, and Morality in the Anglo-American World

During the eighteenth century, British courts banished over 50,000 convicted men, women, and children to the American colonies and many of whom were sold as convict servants. Historians have shown that transportation provided labor for the growing colonial project in North America and removed offenders from Britain’s communities, yet contemporaries on both sides of the Atlantic spent years contesting the economic efficiently of institutional banishment and used moral justifications to defend their positions regarding the punishment. This paper explores the roles that British convict transportation and penal servitude in America played in the early history of humanitarianism and argues that criminalized servitude evoked new rhetoric and debates that both connected with and influenced a broader discourse on coerced labor and human suffering by the late eighteenth century. Focusing primarily on legal and judicial records and public commentaries, the paper begins with the emergence of the Transportation Act of 1718 and traces the changing sentiments and practices concerning criminal laborers throughout the century. While British and colonial elites understood their authority as essential to a well-ordered household and labor regime, banishment and penal servitude had unintentional consequences for both Britain and America, and moralists and elites constructed a new discursive environment, one that raised complex questions and debates over coerced labor, unfreedom, and cruelty. Exploring banishment and penal servitude in this manner reveals a new and early site for shifting notions of human responsibility and moral thinking in the Anglo-American world.