Hamish Maxwell-Stewart
Biographic Data
| ID | 197636 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Hamish Maxwell-Stewart |
| GIVEN NAMES | Hamish |
| FAMILY NAME | Maxwell-Stewart |
| SIGNATURE | MAXWELL-STEWART H |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Tasmania |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7336-0953 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 42 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 61 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 41 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2001 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Trouble on the Roads: Using Digital Techniques to Explore Convict Protest in Van Diemen’s Land
It is now known that convicts engaged in widespread work-related dissent in New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land, and that dissent climaxed in 1833–34 undermining penal transportation as a system of labour exploitation. This article explores resistance patterns within a particular road party, Notman’s Gang in Northern Tasmania between 1831 and 1834. An important aim is to demonstrate how quantitative data can be used to place qualitative observa…
Mobility and Coercion in an Age of Wars and Revolutions: A Global History, c. 1750–1830
The political upheavals and military confrontations that rocked the world during the decades around 1800 saw forced migrations on a massive scale. This global history brings this explosion into full view. Rather than describing coerced mobilities as an aberration in a period usually identified with quests for liberty and political participation, this book recognizes them as a crucial but hitherto under-appreciated dimension of the transformations…
Jared Davidson, Blood & Dirt: Prison Labour and the Making of New Zealand
Alcohol, Work and Play in Convict Australia
This article critiques previous attempts to contextualise the culture of drinking in convict Australia, arguing that such practices were embedded within a moral economy of work. It explains the importance of alcohol in British society and the manner in which its relationship to labour changed with industrialisation. Analysing quantitative and qualitive evidence drawn from court and convict records, it demonstrates how alcohol was used to motivate…
‘Damned lives and statistics’: Big data, collective biography and convict history
We do not here theorise the distinctions between, for example, prosopography and 'collective biography', noting only that attempts to locate individual lives within broader systems and structures, including methods employing large-scale quantitative analyses, have revolutionised history and biography, and that such definitions are sometimes loose and flexible
Battling the Bench
Shipboard Mutinies
A Panoptic Eye: The punishment and reform of female convicts in Van Diemen’s Land
The management of 13,500 women transported to Van Diemen’s Land during the fifty years to 1853 was a constant problem for the authorities. In response to suddenly increased numbers during the 1820s when ships began arriving directly from Britain, ‘female factories’ were built. These multipurpose institutions were designed to process new arrivals, regulate the supply of female convict labour to settler households and punish the recalcitrant. All w…
A Topography of Dots: New Perspectives on the History and Legend of the Forty Thieves
Accounts of criminal organisations referred to as the “Forty Thieves” have been noted throughout nineteenth century Britain. While the profile of alleged members takes several different forms, the most common descriptions refer to gangs of youth who commit acts of coordinated theft in public spaces and at community events. Included in these accounts are repeated references to tattooed markings said to identify gang members. These consisted of a s…
Unfree Workers: Insubordination and Resistance in Convict Australia, 1788-1860
Solitary confinement and health and other life course outcomes for convict women
Many studies have linked sensory deprivation punishments to elevated risk of suicide and other immediate poor health outcomes, although there have been comparatively few examinations of the potential medium- and long-term impacts of being placed in a solitary cell. This article seeks to fill that gap by exploring the effects that the experience of solitary confinement and separate treatment had on the life courses of female convicts transported t…
Adolescent growth and convict transportation to nineteenth-century Australia
This paper explores growth patterns for British and Irish adolescents transported to Australia in the 19th century. During incarceration in Australia, the young convicts did not catch up with contemporary standards of potential stature—contrary to what we are led to expect by the existing literature and the high calorie convict diet. Rather, the experience of transportation stunted the adolescent male convicts. Variation between height on arrival…
Convicts: A Global History by Clare Anderson
Reviewed by: Convicts: A Global History by Clare Anderson Hamish Maxwell-Stewart Convicts: A Global History. By Clare Anderson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Convicts: A Global History is a huge temporal and geographical undertaking. A hundred and thirty individual penal destinations scattered across nineteen different polities are covered in the pages of this remarkable book. While the weight lies with the Western Empires, non-Eur…
Historical Databases Now and in the Future
Kees Mandemakers has enriched historical databases in the Netherlands and internationally through the development of the Historical Sample of the Netherlands, the Intermediate Data Structure, a practical implementation of rule-based record linking (LINKS) and personal encouragement of high quality longitudinal data in a number of countries
Reconstructing a Longitudinal Dataset for Tasmania
This article describes the formation of The Tasmanian Historical Dataset a longitudinal data resource spanning the 19th and early 20th century. This resource contains over 1.6 million records drawn from digitised prison and hospital admission registers, military enlistment papers, births, deaths and marriages, census and muster records, arrival and departure lists, bank accounts and property valuations, maps and plans and meteorological observati…
Rites of Passage: The Voyage to Convict Australia and the Creation of the Penal Labourer
This article explores the ways in which convict labour was simultaneously regulated and co-opted on the long sea passage to the Australian penal colonies. It uses linked longitudinal data for over 39,000 male convicts transported between the years 1817 and 1853 to Van Diemen’s Land, to explore on-board recruitment of convicts by surgeons. A particular focus of interest is the way in which the organisation of the convict vessel shaped subsequent e…
Selection Bias and Social Science History
Historians and social scientists routinely, and inevitably, rely on sources that are unrepresentative of the past. The articles in this special issue of the journal illustrate the widespread prevalence of selection bias in historical sources, and the ways in which historians negotiate this challenge to reach useful conclusions from valuable, if imperfect sources
The Short and the Tall: Comparing Stature and Socioeconomic Status for Male Prison and Military Populations
Over the last four decades, historians and social scientists have become increasingly interested in the way in which information about stature might be used to explore the impact of environmental factors on the physical growth and well-being of past populations. A particular problem encountered by many researchers is that height data is only available for selected populations, typically military recruits or those admitted to correctional institut…
Transportation from Britain and Ireland, 1615–1875
Despite recent research which has revealed the extent to which penal transportationwas employed as a labour mobilization device across the Western empires, the Britishremain the colonial power most associated with the practice. The role that convicttransportation played in the British colonization of Australia is particularly wellknown. It should come as little surprise that the UNESCO World Heritage listingof places associated with the history o…
Landscapes of production and punishment: Convict labour management on the Tasman Peninsula 1830-1877
The 'Landscapes of Production and Punishment' project aims to examine how convict labour from 1830-1877 affected the built and natural landscapes of the Tasman Peninsula, as well as the lives of the convicts themselves
Landscapes of Production and Punishment: Convict labour in the Australian context
This paper presents an interdisciplinary project that uses archaeological and historical sources to explore the formation of a penal landscape in the Australian colonial context. The project focuses on the convict-period legacy of the Tasman Peninsula (Tasmania, Australia), in particular the former penal station of Port Arthur (1830-1877). The research utilises three exceptional data series to examine the impact of convict labour on landscape and…
Penal Transportation, Family History, and Convict Tourism
The chapter explores the gap between the lived experience of Australia’s founding convict mothers and fathers and heritage site portrayals of penal transportation. It focuses particularly on Tasmania, formerly known as Van Diemen’s Land—which operated as a British penal colony in the years 1803–1853. We argue that a disproportionate number of convict heritage sites are located in former punishment stations. As such, much of the discourse about co…
The State, Convicts and Longitudinal Analysis
In 2006 the Records of the Tasmanian Convict Department were inscribed on the UNESCO Memory of the World Register. This extraordinarily intact collection of records document the lives of 73,000 male and female prisoners transported to Van Diemen’s Land. This article examines ways in which this information can be used to explore the impact of forced labour migration on the lives of convicts. It focuses in particular on the assembly of cradle-to-gr…
Big Data and Australian History
Big History is a term that has particular resonance for historians of Australia acontinent with a 60,000-year record of human occupation and a geologicalhistory that extends a further 3,070 million years. Recently historians havealso begun to engage with the concept of big data. It is not surprising that thesetwo terms are often linked. Any attempt to unite natural and human history ina single, grand and intelligible narrative will necessarily re…
The Rise and Fall of Penal Transportation
Many societies have either transported convicted prisoners to a place of coerced labor or sold them as slaves. From the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries several European states made extensive use of penal transportation to supply labor to overseas colonies. A practice that operated in parallel to the Atlantic and Indian Ocean slave trades, penal transportation was applied to both prisoners sentenced in European courts and those convicted in t…
Landscapes of Production and Punishment: Convict labour in the Australian context
This paper presents an interdisciplinary project that uses archaeological and historical sources to explore the formation of a penal landscape in the Australian colonial context. The project focuses on the convict-period legacy of the Tasman Peninsula (Tasmania, Australia), in particular the former penal station of Port Arthur (1830-1877). The research utilises three exceptional data series to examine the impact of convict labour on landscape and…
Convict Transportation from Britain and Ireland 1615–1870
In 1787, the First Fleet was dispatched from the British Isles to find a penal settlement at Botany Bay, Australia. By this time, the British government had already experimented with convict transportation for over 160 years. The aim of this article is to place the history of transportation to Australia within the context of the wider flow of convict labour from the British Isles in the period 1615 to 1870. Using data from a range of sources it a…
The State, Convicts and Longitudinal Analysis
In 2006 the Records of the Tasmanian Convict Department were inscribed on the UNESCO Memory of the World Register. This extraordinarily intact collection of records document the lives of 73,000 male and female prisoners transported to Van Diemen’s Land. This article examines ways in which this information can be used to explore the impact of forced labour migration on the lives of convicts. It focuses in particular on the assembly of cradle-to-gr…
The Whip Is a Very Contagious Kind of Thing: Flogging and humanitarian reform in penal Australia
This paper traces humanitarian debates over corporal punishment and the use of the lash in the Australian colonies in the nineteenth century, with particular attention to Quakers James Backhouse and George Washington Walker's interventions in penal discipline in colonial Van Diemen's Land. It examine the ways that corporal punishment of convicts and Aboriginal peoples was framed through abolitionist eyes and explores in detail specific objections…
Landscapes of production and punishment: Convict labour management on the Tasman Peninsula 1830-1877
The 'Landscapes of Production and Punishment' project aims to examine how convict labour from 1830-1877 affected the built and natural landscapes of the Tasman Peninsula, as well as the lives of the convicts themselves
Big Data and Australian History
Big History is a term that has particular resonance for historians of Australia acontinent with a 60,000-year record of human occupation and a geologicalhistory that extends a further 3,070 million years. Recently historians havealso begun to engage with the concept of big data. It is not surprising that thesetwo terms are often linked. Any attempt to unite natural and human history ina single, grand and intelligible narrative will necessarily re…
Adolescent growth and convict transportation to nineteenth-century Australia
This paper explores growth patterns for British and Irish adolescents transported to Australia in the 19th century. During incarceration in Australia, the young convicts did not catch up with contemporary standards of potential stature—contrary to what we are led to expect by the existing literature and the high calorie convict diet. Rather, the experience of transportation stunted the adolescent male convicts. Variation between height on arrival…
The Rise and Fall of Penal Transportation
Many societies have either transported convicted prisoners to a place of coerced labor or sold them as slaves. From the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries several European states made extensive use of penal transportation to supply labor to overseas colonies. A practice that operated in parallel to the Atlantic and Indian Ocean slave trades, penal transportation was applied to both prisoners sentenced in European courts and those convicted in t…
Those Lads Contrived a Plan”: Attempts at Mutiny on Australia-Bound Convict Vessels
Between 1787 and 1868 a total of 830 convict vessels left the British Isles bound for the Australian penal colonies. While only one of these was seized by mutineers, many convicts were punished for plotting to take the ship that carried them to the Antipodes. This article will explore the circumstances that shaped those mutiny attempts and the impact that they had on convict management strategies
Research note: The founders and survivors project
This paper describes the multidisciplinary project Founders and Survivors: Australian Life Courses in Historical Context. Individual life courses, families and generations through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are being reconstituted from a wide range of data including convict records; birth, death and marriage registrations; and World War I service records. The project will result in a longitudinal study of Australian settlement, the lo…
Rites of Passage: The Voyage to Convict Australia and the Creation of the Penal Labourer
This article explores the ways in which convict labour was simultaneously regulated and co-opted on the long sea passage to the Australian penal colonies. It uses linked longitudinal data for over 39,000 male convicts transported between the years 1817 and 1853 to Van Diemen’s Land, to explore on-board recruitment of convicts by surgeons. A particular focus of interest is the way in which the organisation of the convict vessel shaped subsequent e…
Selection Bias and Social Science History
Historians and social scientists routinely, and inevitably, rely on sources that are unrepresentative of the past. The articles in this special issue of the journal illustrate the widespread prevalence of selection bias in historical sources, and the ways in which historians negotiate this challenge to reach useful conclusions from valuable, if imperfect sources
The Short and the Tall: Comparing Stature and Socioeconomic Status for Male Prison and Military Populations
Over the last four decades, historians and social scientists have become increasingly interested in the way in which information about stature might be used to explore the impact of environmental factors on the physical growth and well-being of past populations. A particular problem encountered by many researchers is that height data is only available for selected populations, typically military recruits or those admitted to correctional institut…
Prison and the colonial family
Between 1865 and 1924, descriptions of 39,000 discharged prisoners were circulatedvia the pages of the Tasmanian Police Gazette. This article examines ways in whichthese detailed records can be used to shed light on childhood experience in this formerBritish penal colony. The authors compare height measurements for Tasmanian-bornprisoners with those for British and Irish migrants in order to explore the social andenvironmental circumstances that …
Inside the Rocks: The Archaeology of a Neighbourhood
Mutiny at Deloraine: Ganging and Convict Resistance in 1840s Van Diemen's Land
An incident of alleged animal maiming occurred in October 1845. In this article we attempt firstly to explain why and how it happened. Secondly, we try to discover the conflicting meanings that various contemporaries gave to this occurrence. We believe that the explanation of the event lies in the nature of ganged labour employed at Deloraine and the complex relationships that existed in 1845 between this ganged labour and the convict administrat…
The Convicts of the Eleanor
Eighteenth-Century Criminal Transportation: The Formation of the Criminal Atlantic
Thomas Jefferson was horrified to see a draft of the Encyclopédie that claimed that America was peopled by three classes—servants, slaves, and convicts. In defense he argued that only two thousand criminals had been transported across the Atlantic. In fact, the actual number arriving over the course of the eighteenth century was in excess of fifty thousand, accounting for as many as one in four of all migrants from Britain in the period 1700–1776…
Robin Haines, Doctors at Sea: Emigrant Voyages to Colonial Australia
Closing hell's gates: The death of a convict station
In October 1827, nine convicts who had endured years of unimaginable cruelty at the hands of the system opted for 'state-assisted' escape. Five terrified witnesses - their hands and feet bound - were forced to watch as the chained convicts seized Constable George Rex and drowned him in the tannin-stained waters of the harbour. When the sentence of death was pronounced upon them, the condemned prisoners uttered just one word in reply: Amen...For t…
Health and Medicine at Sea, 1700-1900
Maritime medicine, together with its links to the development of empire, is a burgeoning area of historical interest and enquiry. This book, based on extensive original research, explores the history of health and medicine in maritime and imperial contexts in a key period, reflecting the growing professionalization of medicine at sea from the establishment of the Sick and Hurt Board to the end of the Victorian era. The chapters, written by leadin…
Competition and Conflict on The Forgotten Frontier Western Van Diemen’S Land 1822–33
This article explores the impact of Macquarie Harbour penal station on the Aboriginal population of Western Van Diemen’s Land in the period 1822–33. It questions some of the assumptions that have been made in the recent literature about the level of contact between Europeans and Aboriginal bands along this coast prior to George Augustus Robinson’s ‘friendly mission’ of 1830–34. In particular it disputes the claim that the relatively low numbers o…
Convict Transportation from Britain and Ireland 1615–1870
In 1787, the First Fleet was dispatched from the British Isles to find a penal settlement at Botany Bay, Australia. By this time, the British government had already experimented with convict transportation for over 160 years. The aim of this article is to place the history of transportation to Australia within the context of the wider flow of convict labour from the British Isles in the period 1615 to 1870. Using data from a range of sources it a…
Research note: The founders and survivors project
This paper describes the multidisciplinary project Founders and Survivors: Australian Life Courses in Historical Context. Individual life courses, families and generations through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are being reconstituted from a wide range of data including convict records; birth, death and marriage registrations; and World War I service records. The project will result in a longitudinal study of Australian settlement, the lo…
Aboriginal Deaths in Custody in Colonial Australia, 1805-1860
The majority of the 160,000 convicts transported to Australia in the nineteenth century were European, yet a small number of colonial subjects were also incorporated into Britain's Antipodean penal settlements. These included Aboriginal prisoners from the New South Wales frontier. By the 1850s a few Aboriginal convicts were incarcerated at Cockatoo Island, Sydney Harbour, where their comparatively high rate of death attracted administrative atten…
Those Lads Contrived a Plan”: Attempts at Mutiny on Australia-Bound Convict Vessels
Between 1787 and 1868 a total of 830 convict vessels left the British Isles bound for the Australian penal colonies. While only one of these was seized by mutineers, many convicts were punished for plotting to take the ship that carried them to the Antipodes. This article will explore the circumstances that shaped those mutiny attempts and the impact that they had on convict management strategies
Introduction: Health, Human Capital, and Early Economic Development in A ustralia and N ew Z ealand
Growing Incomes, Growing People in Nineteenth‐Century T asmania
The earliest measures of well‐being for E uropeans born in the P acific region are heights and wages in T asmania. Evidence of rising stature in middle decades of the nineteenth century survives multiple checks for measurement, compositional, and selection bias. The challenge to health and stature seen in other settler societies (the ‘antebellum paradox’) is not visible here. We sketch an interpretation for the simultaneous rise of T asmanian sta…
Prison and the history of the family
Prisons are not family-friendly. After Edward Kennedy was sentenced to seven years’ transportation by the Dumfries Court of Justiciary in April 1831, he marked the occasion with a memorial to his wife. By the time he arrived in the British penal colony of Van Diemen’s Land, his arm was tattooed with the words: ‘Catherine my dear you are my own, my heart lies in your breast, although there’s many a mile of distant love and strong seas between us E…
Prison and the colonial family
Between 1865 and 1924, descriptions of 39,000 discharged prisoners were circulatedvia the pages of the Tasmanian Police Gazette. This article examines ways in whichthese detailed records can be used to shed light on childhood experience in this formerBritish penal colony. The authors compare height measurements for Tasmanian-bornprisoners with those for British and Irish migrants in order to explore the social andenvironmental circumstances that …
The State, Convicts and Longitudinal Analysis
In 2006 the Records of the Tasmanian Convict Department were inscribed on the UNESCO Memory of the World Register. This extraordinarily intact collection of records document the lives of 73,000 male and female prisoners transported to Van Diemen’s Land. This article examines ways in which this information can be used to explore the impact of forced labour migration on the lives of convicts. It focuses in particular on the assembly of cradle-to-gr…
Big Data and Australian History
Big History is a term that has particular resonance for historians of Australia acontinent with a 60,000-year record of human occupation and a geologicalhistory that extends a further 3,070 million years. Recently historians havealso begun to engage with the concept of big data. It is not surprising that thesetwo terms are often linked. Any attempt to unite natural and human history ina single, grand and intelligible narrative will necessarily re…
The Rise and Fall of Penal Transportation
Many societies have either transported convicted prisoners to a place of coerced labor or sold them as slaves. From the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries several European states made extensive use of penal transportation to supply labor to overseas colonies. A practice that operated in parallel to the Atlantic and Indian Ocean slave trades, penal transportation was applied to both prisoners sentenced in European courts and those convicted in t…
The Whip Is a Very Contagious Kind of Thing: Flogging and humanitarian reform in penal Australia
This paper traces humanitarian debates over corporal punishment and the use of the lash in the Australian colonies in the nineteenth century, with particular attention to Quakers James Backhouse and George Washington Walker's interventions in penal discipline in colonial Van Diemen's Land. It examine the ways that corporal punishment of convicts and Aboriginal peoples was framed through abolitionist eyes and explores in detail specific objections…
Penal Transportation, Family History, and Convict Tourism
The chapter explores the gap between the lived experience of Australia’s founding convict mothers and fathers and heritage site portrayals of penal transportation. It focuses particularly on Tasmania, formerly known as Van Diemen’s Land—which operated as a British penal colony in the years 1803–1853. We argue that a disproportionate number of convict heritage sites are located in former punishment stations. As such, much of the discourse about co…
Transportation from Britain and Ireland, 1615–1875
Despite recent research which has revealed the extent to which penal transportationwas employed as a labour mobilization device across the Western empires, the Britishremain the colonial power most associated with the practice. The role that convicttransportation played in the British colonization of Australia is particularly wellknown. It should come as little surprise that the UNESCO World Heritage listingof places associated with the history o…
Landscapes of production and punishment: Convict labour management on the Tasman Peninsula 1830-1877
The 'Landscapes of Production and Punishment' project aims to examine how convict labour from 1830-1877 affected the built and natural landscapes of the Tasman Peninsula, as well as the lives of the convicts themselves
Landscapes of Production and Punishment: Convict labour in the Australian context
This paper presents an interdisciplinary project that uses archaeological and historical sources to explore the formation of a penal landscape in the Australian colonial context. The project focuses on the convict-period legacy of the Tasman Peninsula (Tasmania, Australia), in particular the former penal station of Port Arthur (1830-1877). The research utilises three exceptional data series to examine the impact of convict labour on landscape and…
Selection Bias and Social Science History
Historians and social scientists routinely, and inevitably, rely on sources that are unrepresentative of the past. The articles in this special issue of the journal illustrate the widespread prevalence of selection bias in historical sources, and the ways in which historians negotiate this challenge to reach useful conclusions from valuable, if imperfect sources
History (32 works) · Sociology (30 works) · Political science (24 works) · Criminology (21 works) · Law (21 works) · Convict (20 works) · Australian History and Society (19 works) · Archaeology (17 works) · History (17 works) · Colonialism, slavery, and trade (13 works)