Empire of Hell

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.