Reviewed by Farley Grubb | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 63.4

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Reviewed by Farley Grubb | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 63.4 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Farley Grubb, University of Delaware

Eighteenth-Century Criminal Transportation: The Formation of the Criminal Atlantic. By Gwenda Morgan and Peter Rushton. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. 250 pages. $69.95 (cloth).
Gwenda Morgan and Peter Rushton make three important contributions to the understanding of the process by which English convicts were transported to colonial America. First, they focus on areas beyond London and the home counties. Whereas the home counties were the largest single supplier of convicts to America, the rest of England still accounted for just less than half those transported. Understanding how the process worked in these out counties and outports, therefore, is important for completing the picture of convict transportation to colonial America. Prior convict studies have relied heavily on information from London, Middlesex, and Bristol, such as the excellent studies by J. M. Beattie and A. Roger Ekirch.¹ Therefore Morgan and Rushton's study serves as a valuable complement to, rather than a substitute for, these prior studies.	1
Second, the authors tackle the difficult problem of separating reality from fiction in literary evidence on the convict trade. The very nature of crime and criminal punishment lends itself to sensationalistic, exaggerated, and even fictionalized storytelling. Literary evidence about the convict trade is plentiful and rich in the kind of information that cannot be gleaned from quantifiable records, so determining the veracity of this evidence is critical to a comprehension of the trade. Because literary evidence is too often taken at face value, Morgan and Rushton supply a valuable and seldom-performed service here.	2
Third, the book elevates the convict trade from an often forgotten aspect or, at best, a minor sideshow in colonial American history to a central motif in the eighteenth-century discourse between the colonies and their mother country, influencing how the relationship was represented, communicated, and defined. The common experience of forced labor migration at first generated a view of the criminal Atlantic that tied the colonies and Britain together in common cause but later worked to divide them.	3
After the 1718 Convict Transportation Act empowered local courts to sentence convicts directly to transportation, Morgan and Rushton document a surprising variability in the use of criminal transportation across Durham, Newcastle, and Northumberland in the northeast of England, Cumberland, Lancashire, and Westmorland in the northwest, and Devon and Bristol in the west. Local discretion predominated. In some locations such as Northumberland and Newcastle, for example, transportation quickly became part of the punishment inflicted by quarterly session courts. Other locations lagged behind. Cumberland did not inflict transportation on its convicts at quarterly sessions until the 1740s. And some places, such as Westmorland, virtually ignored the power to transport convicts. In locations such as Durham, convicts were predominantly sentenced to transportation at the assize courts, whereas in other places, including Lancashire, they were predominantly sentenced to transportation at the quarterly session courts. Similarly, the percentage of transported convicts who were female varied by location from a high of 52 percent for Newcastle to a low of 5 percent for Westmorland from 1751 to 1776. Shipping arrangements in these fringe convict markets were also fluid and variable. What accounts for such variability across locations is difficult to determine. Though differences in local precedence and the relative cost of executing sentences between locations may have played a role, Morgan and Rushton leave the explanations for much of this puzzling variation to future research.	. . .

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