This chapter explores the circulation and exchange of ideas about punitive mobility during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It opens with a discussion of European views on convicts and penal colonies before the 1850s, and then examines the background to the establishment of the International Penitentiary Congress in 1872 and the key concerns of its meetings. It foregrounds the tensions between the penal and economic ambitions of punitive relocation, the global influence of penal innovators such as Alexander Maconochie and Sir Walter Crofton, and the motivations and observations of global penal tours. It suggests that global discussions and tours were instigated by the desire to investigate and compare innovations in punishment, and as part of the long history of connecting convicts to political and territorial ambitions. These included Germany’s wish to expand its empire in Africa and the Pacific in the early 1900s, Russia’s desire to settle the Far East, and Britain’s hope that France would move to abolish transportation in the period between the two world wars.

This chapter suggests that the cosmopolitanism of convicts, ex-convict settlers, and their descendants rendered penal colonies ideal places for investigations into the human sciences, and for the development of social science research methods. Administrators and visitors carried out innovative statistical and ethnographic studies in punitive locations, triangulating medical records, and anthropometric measurement with surveys, questionnaires, and interviews. The focus of attention of such research included the pathology of criminal behaviour, the social, cultural, and biological impacts of transportation, and sexuality. In some cases, it emerged out of a concern with the merits or otherwise of penal colonization. In others, it contributed to and shaped contemporary debates on race and, in the Indian context, caste. This can be seen in the analysis of the work of French naval surgeon Joseph Orgéas, in French Guiana; Anton Chekhov’s famous study of Sakhalin Island in the Russian Far East; and censuses in the Andaman Islands. Finally, the chapter examines Franck Cazanove’s study of sexuality in the relégué(e) (repeat offender) settlement of Saint-Jean-du-Maroni in French Guiana. Inadvertently, though focused on ‘depravity’, it reveals much about same-sex cohabitation, marriage, and love.

Convict bodies contributed to knowledge and representations of criminality, race, and ethnicity, and tropical disease. Scientists used convicts to establish causal links between physique, criminal character, and sometimes race. They were especially interested in anthropometry, or the science of physical measurement, including through close analysis of the skull or other bodily features. By the third quarter of the nineteenth century, Italian positivist Cesare Lombroso, author of L’Uomo Delinquente (Criminal Man), had made the highly influential, though controversial, proposition that criminality was biologically determined, connected to hierarchies of race, and thus related to degeneration. Lombroso’s theory was particularly influential in Latin America, though the Russians, British, and French received it with more ambivalence. Later, scientists became interested in how both sensitivity to pain and in flows of blood (including to the face) might be physical manifestations of criminality. From the nineteenth century onwards, penal colonies were important spaces of medical research on morbidity and mortality, including studies of leprosy, hookworm, yellow fever, and malaria in places such as French Guiana and the Andamans. Such research fed into larger global investigations into mosquitos as vectors for sickness and disease. The era under consideration here also impacted on the purpose and method of convict studies.

Chapter 3 examines the scope, scale, and experience of convict mobility in the expansionist regimes of mid-Qing China, post-Meiji restoration Japan, continental Europe, and the independent nation states of Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, Mexico, and Peru. Covering the period from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries, it shows that government sent convicts over long distances, including to borders and offshore islands, for a combination of reasons. This included the management of troublesome or insurgent populations, the occupation and development of geo-political frontiers, the encouragement of free migration, and the appropriation of convict labour. Engaged in global conversations about punishment, governments also used punitive mobility to inflict severe punishment, provide a strong deterrent against crime, and in some cases to rehabilitate offenders. However, these various objectives were not always compatible, and convict agency sometimes compromised their success. For these reasons, the chapter argues that it is useful to conceptualize convict mobility as a system operated by a range of stakeholders who did not always have identical desires and goals regarding governance, punishment, work, and geo-political expansion, and resisted and subverted by convicts in similarly diverse ways.

This chapter argues that sites of punitive relocation were important locations for colonial encounters, exploration, and knowledge formation. Their relatively open character meant that many convicts lived and settled in already dynamic societies in which Indigenous peoples, settlers, labour migrants, and/ or enslaved persons lived. Thus, they constituted ideal vantage points for the observation of Indigenous peoples, and for commodity exchange. Central points here are that Indigenous people greatly assisted the process of penal colonization that at the same time dispossessed and devastated them, and they encountered and resisted the people who came to live in sites of penal relocation in a variety of ways. From a history of science perspective, it is also significant that the separate penal colonies established in nations and empires from the late eighteenth century onwards were often located in relatively pristine natural spaces. Penal administrators and visiting naturalists, botanists, geologists, and zoologists exploited these natural resources in their scientific research – often assisted by convicts and Indigenous peoples. Convicts and colonized populations played a vital role in Europe’s so-called voyages of discovery, with scientists drawing on their superior local knowledge and practical support.