Convict transportation in Early Modern England and America: surplus persons and fallen souls

This article highlights the significance of religion in the historiography of convict transportation to early modern America. Drawing from seventeenth and eighteenth-century archival sources, pamphlets, and treatises, we examine how religious ideas about idleness, sin, and redemption framed the lives of convict transportees. We argue that religious elites justified transportation as an opportunity for redemption, yet transportees experienced "contingent redeemability"—granted mercy in England but reduced to expendable labor in colonial America. By bringing religion ‘back in’ to historical criminological analyses, we demonstrate how Protestant theology and economic imperatives jointly structured this punishment system, offering insights into the genealogy of Anglo-American penal institutions.