By building new maritime infrastructures, convicts were central to the transformation of global trade and imperial governance in the steam revolution.
This £177.2k project received £90.5k from the Leverhulme Trust (UK), as part of their Early Career Fellowship fund, to examine the crucial role of convict labour in building the maritime infrastructure that connected Britain to its empire in the age of steam power. The project, with Dr Katherine Roscoe, Lecturer in Criminology, as the Principal Investigator, with Professor Barry Godfrey, Professor of Social Justice, as Co-Investigator, ran from January 2020 – December 2022.
This project placed prison labour at the centre of globalisation, industrialisation, and technological modernisation, linking these historic structures to the continuing reliance on unfree labour within the global supply chain. Using digital methods, the research was able to map the ‘life geographies’ of men that were transported from Britain and Ireland to Bermuda, Gibraltar, and Australia.
As the first globally comparative study of convict labour in maritime industries in Britain, Ireland, Bermuda, and Gibraltar, the findings confirmed that convicts plated a crucial, and a little-recognised role, in building and modernising the infrastructures of global connectivity upon which British imperialism relied.
Findings have also disproved a number of ‘myths’ about convict labour. Convict labour was found to not be entirely low skilled, as although the majority of convicts worked quarrying and moving stone, a small number of ‘skilled’ labourers made a big difference in running dockyards. Convict labour was found to be not entirely coerced. Incentives were widely (and illicitly) used, based on free labourers’ rights, to ensure willing compliance of convicts, who otherwise protested decline in working conditions, disrupting the clear divide between ‘free’ and ‘unfree’ labour.
It is important to note that convict labour was not a last resort. It was actually deemed preferable to both British military labour, local Spanish, Indigenous Australian, and Black Bermudian workers, the latter due to hardening scientific racial ideologies. Convict labour was integral to the modernisation of British and imperial infrastructures, deployed specifically to perform ‘upgrades’ to accept steam-powered vessels and responded rapidly to demands of new technology.
Dr Katherine Roscoe was recognised for her outstanding contribution to research, with this project resulting in Katy being awarded the ‘Alan Beeston Early Career Researcher of the Year’ prize at the 2022 Staff Awards. Katy was highly commended for the Kay Daniels Prize in Convict History by the Australian Historical Association, and highly commended for the University’s Images of Research Competition for a photo of Roebourne prison in Western Australia. Katy also won second prize for the 2021 University Research in Verse competition for poem about convict labour ‘Progress’.
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