Empire of Hell Religion and the Campaign to End Convict Transportation in the British Empire, 1788–1875

This revisionist history of convict transportation from Britain and Ireland will challenge much that you thought you knew about religion and penal colonies. Based on original archival sources, it examines arguments by elites in favour and against the practice of transportation and considers why they thought it could be reformed, and, later, why it should be abolished. In this, the first religious history of the anti-transportation campaign, Hilary M. Carey addresses all the colonies and denominations engaged in the debate. Without minimising the individual horror of transportation, she demonstrates the wide variety of reformist experiments conducted in the Australian penal colonies, as well as the hulks, Bermuda and Gibraltar. She showcases the idealists who fought for more humane conditions for prisoners, as well as the 'political parsons', who lobbied to bring transportation to an end. The complex arguments about convict transportation, which were engaged in by bishops, judges, priests, politicians and intellectuals, crossed continents and divided an empire.

List of tables; Preface; Acknowledgements; List of abbreviations; 1. Introduction: 'Empire of Hell'; 2. Saints, Whigs and penal colonies, 1788–1822; 3. 'Hell upon earth': Sir George Arthur in Van Diemen's land, 1823–1837; 4. Quakers and convict concerns; 5. Christian utilitarianism and Archbishop Richard Whately; 6. Catholics, Protestants and the 'horrors of transportation'; 7. 'Ocean hell': Captain Maconochie and Norfolk Island, 1837–1844; 8. Probation in Van Diemen's land, 1840–1849; 9. 'Political parsons' and the anti-transportation movement, 1847–1854; 10. 'Floating hells': Bermuda, Gibraltar and the Hulks, 1850–1875; 11. 'Reformatory colony': Western Australia, 1850–1868; 12. Conclusion: 'this great scheme of human redemption'; Bibliography; Index.

Hilary M. Carey is Professor of Imperial and Religious History at the University of Bristol. She is the author of God's Empire (Cambridge, 2011), nominated for the Ernest Scott Prize, and co-editor of Religion and Greater Ireland (2015). She is conjoint professor at the University of Newcastle, New South Wales and Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities.