An 'Injurious' Population: Caribbean-Australian Penal Transportation and Imperial Racial Politics

Lookup NU author(s): Professor Diana Paton

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Abstract

Before the 1820s, enslaved people in many of Britain's Caribbean colonies were regularly sentenced to the punishment of `transportation', which meant being sold into the slave trade within the Americas. For a short period ending in 1837 people sentenced to transportation in the Caribbean were sent to Australia via Britain. This article examines these successive systems of transportation and addresses the Colonial Office decision of 1837 to end transportation from the West Indies to Australia. It highlights the significance of an emerging racial and spatial politics of empire that coded Australia white and the Caribbean black, and tried to ensure that the two did not mix.